


Disturb the Universe

by PyrrhaIphis



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Velvet Goldmine
Genre: (mild) Internalized Homophobia, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Glam Rock, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Swearing, Threat of War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:48:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 50,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23304160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PyrrhaIphis/pseuds/PyrrhaIphis
Summary: Teenage runaway Arthur Stuart is helped out by a mysterious woman calling herself "the Doctor" when his luggage is stolen.  She also gives him a ride to a nearby planet where his idols, Brian Slade and Curt Wild, will soon be holding a major concert.  There, they run into the Doctor's old friend, Ace McShane, and the two of them decide to linger awhile, because it seems as though much more is brewing than just a rock concert...As this is an AU for "Velvet Goldmine" wherein all characters were born in the far distant future on other worlds, no knowledge of "Velvet Goldmine" is necessary to follow the story.  And as "Velvet Goldmine" is a very R-rated movie, the characters (well, mostly just Curt) swear a lot, and it would just be too OOC if they don't swear here, so please don't read if f-bombs bother you.  (But I promise there's no swearing from the "Doctor Who" characters!)
Relationships: Arthur Stuart/Curt Wild, Brian Slade/Arthur Stuart/Curt Wild, Brian Slade/Curt Wild
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> General note to every reader: please let me know if there are any inappropriate Americanisms in the text so I can fix them! (Also, I apologize for the overly dramatic title. I would normally go with song titles, song lyrics, or Oscar Wilde quotes for a VG fic, but...I saw this line from "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" and it just felt like it was screaming out to be a title.)
> 
> Special note to "Doctor Who" readers: this is needless to say taking place before the thirteenth Doctor's second season. (Not sure if it matters if it's before or after the New Year's special.) While you don't need to know anything about "Velvet Goldmine" to follow this, given my inability to write descriptive text, it'll be useful for you to at least see some pictures of the primary cast. In the order that they're mentioned, we have Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a teenage fan in the 1970s portions of the film; I've got two pictures for him, the first still in Manchester (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120879/mediaviewer/rm2268367361) and the second all glammed-up in London (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120879/mediaviewer/rm411873792). Then there's Brian Slade (Jonathon Rhys Meyers); in the movie, his visual style and performative alter ego were largely based on David Bowie, though none of his songs were Bowie's, the ideal image of him would be this one https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120879/mediaviewer/rm2078781952. And last but certainly not least we have Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), whose visual and musical style is entirely based on Iggy Pop: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120879/mediaviewer/rm4281633281. Of course, for Curt and Brian's first appearance in this fic, you should have this image in mind: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120879/mediaviewer/rm1139257856. Changing topics, regarding Ace, I set this immediately after "Survival" for her because I've only heard a very few of the Big Finish Audio productions, and I didn't want to have to try and figure out how to work with their timeline, so this is hopefully before any of them happened. (Hopefully. If not...well, it's only fan fiction, so you could think of it as an AU for Ace's personal story if need be.)
> 
> Special note to "Velvet Goldmine" readers: actually, there's a lot less to say here, because you'd kind of have to live in a cave not to know the basics of what "Doctor Who" is and at least what the thirteenth Doctor looks like, not to mention the fact that the previous twelve were all men. The only thing to note is that Ace (Sophie Aldred) is the final companion of the original series, who traveled with the seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), and that she was a teenage girl from the 1980s. The best stable image I could find of her with the Doctor is on IMDB at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0017644/mediaviewer/rm1547617280, but the Doctor looks weirdly young in the picture. I think most of the vitally important information you need to understand what's going on is included in the fic...though I should probably point out that almost everything the Doctor references in her past are indeed references to various episodes of the show, either original or new. With one major exception that I'll point out when I get to it.

It was one of those long-legged blighters. Of course it was. They were notorious for stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, after all. Even as he chased after the alien immigrant, Arthur _tried_ not to blame him. It wasn’t their fault they had to steal all the time. It was because of people like Arthur’s father, people who called them awful names and refused to give them jobs. It wasn’t that they were natural criminals. That was just prejudice.

All of that had been much easier to believe before Arthur was having to chase one down through a crowded spaceport to get his luggage back.

Pretty soon they weren’t even in the spaceport anymore. The thief made a turning and left the port, heading into the city proper. As the thief hightailed it to the marketplace, Arthur tried to put on a little extra speed. All his things would end up sold at this rate!

The further they got into the marketplace, the more Arthur started falling behind. The thief kept ducking and dodging, weaving under and over obstacles that he evidently knew by heart, and Arthur kept clipping them. He hadn’t tripped yet, but it was only a matter of time. And, naturally, no one was bothering to help out, even as they all turned to stare at this obvious chase scene.

Worse, he was starting to get tired. They’d been running for at least five minutes now, as far as he could tell.

“Stop, thief!” Arthur shouted, with some of the last of his breath. “He’s taken my bag! Someone stop him!”

Just as Arthur felt his legs slowing down against his will, out of the corner of his eye he saw a blonde woman in a blue-gray duster raise a silver object, pointing it in the general direction of the escaping thief. A yellow-orange light shone at the tip of the object, and some shelves suddenly collapsed in front of the thief, pelting him with the shelves’ contents and stunning him.

Finding one last second wind (he’d had at least three of them already), Arthur put on a final burst of speed to run over to the collapsed alien and grab his suitcase back. “There’s nothing in here you’d want anyway,” he told the stunned thief. “It’s just my clothes.” The only thing he owned that was worth anything was his watch, and he’d been watching that when the thief took his bag in the first place.

“Did your mother buy _all_ of them, or just the ones you’re wearing?” the thief sneered at him, as he pushed half-broken pots off his legs.

Arthur winced, but what could he say? His mum _had_ bought all his clothes.

“Are you all right?” an unfamiliar voice suddenly said. Arthur turned and saw that the blonde woman had approached them. She was wearing dark clothes underneath the duster, with faded rainbow braces. It was not a style familiar to Arthur; she was probably from off-world.

The thief snarled something at the woman in his native tongue as he finally got to his feet, then sprinted away, disappearing into the marketplace. “Here, that’s rude!” the woman shouted after him. Then she turned back to look at Arthur. “You’re all right, then?”

Arthur nodded. “Yes, thank you. But, uh, how did you do that? What was that thing you used to make the shelves collapse?”

“Oh, that was just my sonic.” She glanced around. “Suppose we should find the owner of these things?” She gestured at the broken pots that had been on the shelves.

“Probably not. Unless you can pay for them.”

The woman patted the pockets of her duster. “No money, but I might be able to barter something…”

Arthur shook his head. “Not a good idea. Let’s just go before the owner comes back.” If he was right about who owned the stall, he wasn’t exactly hurting for money. And he wasn’t going to be too friendly to anyone who broke his things. Especially not someone like Arthur.

He started away from the mutilated pottery, and tugged on the woman’s arm when she didn’t immediately follow him. She was quick to respond, and soon they had disappeared around a corner into the little alley at whose mouth the woman had been standing earlier. Arthur was surprised to see that someone had dumped a large blue box in the alley at some point since he had last been there.

“Are you a local, then?” the woman asked.

“Yes’m,” Arthur said, nodding. She did look like she was in her thirties. He ought to be polite, especially after she had helped him out. Last thing he wanted was for his saviour to turn around and hand him back over to his father.

“Oh, no need to be formal with me,” the woman laughed. “You can just call me the Doctor.”

That didn’t sound all that much less formal to Arthur, but he nodded all the same. “I’m Arthur,” he said, offering her a hand out of habit.

She shook it gladly. “Nice to meet you, Arthur. Were you on your way to the spaceport to take a trip?”

“Um…something like that…”

The Doctor smiled at him, warm but also knowing. Arthur felt a chill, as if she was reading him like a data file. She seemed about to say something, but the roar of a shuttle leaving the port prevented her.

“Oh no…” Arthur found himself fighting not to cry.

“Was that your flight?”

Arthur nodded. “There won’t be another for days.” Now what was he going to do? He _couldn’t_ go home…

“Cheer up,” the Doctor said, bumping his shoulder with her hand. “I’ll give you a ride. Where were you going?”

“Um, just over to Xeno 3,” he said. Her clothes were odd enough, the Doctor was probably from out of the system entirely. Just going from the tenth planet to the third must have seemed like child’s play to her. But to Arthur, it represented the most monumental journey of his life, two weeks in a crowded shuttle. Still, it was going to be worth it, because Brian Slade was on the other end, even if Arthur _was_ going to miss the concert in transit.

“Oh, that’s no trouble at all,” the Doctor said, smiling. “I can get you there and be back before Ryan and Yaz finish their running their errands.”

“Ah…” Arthur wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that. “If you’re here with friends, you shouldn’t leave without them. I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll never know I was gone.” She walked up to the blue box, and set a hand on it. “Or I could send Graham to tell them I’ll be right back,” she said, almost as if she was talking to herself. Then she opened the door to the box, and stepped inside.

Surely that box wasn’t a spaceship! It looked like it was made of wood! Not to mention that it was far too small for more than one person. Barely big enough to be a single person escape pod, for that matter. Uncertainly, Arthur moved a little closer to the open door, and glanced inside the box. It looked very dark in there, too dark for a box with a row of windows around the top.

Not sure what else to do, Arthur stepped into the box with his suitcase. A brief wave of darkness passed across his eyes, and then he found himself standing in a cavernous room. The walls were a dark, hexagonal grid with something deep blue inside the depressions, and huge, glowing crystals spiked up around a control panel like fingers in the process of closing. “What…what…how…what…?”

The Doctor stepped out from behind the crystal pillars. “Graham seems to have wandered off,” she announced, shrugging as she pulled a lever. The door behind Arthur closed. “No worries. I’ll find him when I get back.”

“Er…but…it takes weeks to get to Xeno 3 at this time of year.” It was just Arthur’s luck that he’d be forced to make the trip when the two planets were at the furthest points in their relative orbits.

The Doctor laughed. “Not for my TARDIS,” she said, patting the console beside her. “Besides, I’ll just program this in as the return destination. Get back the minute after I left.”

“How is _that_ possible?”

“She’s a timeship as well as a spaceship, of course.”

Arthur set his bag down, and wandered closer to the console. “I didn’t even know that was _possible_.”

“Mmm, don’t think it is for your civilisation. Best not to tell anyone about it,” she added, giving him a little wink.

Arthur nodded, and the Doctor turned to start fiddling with the controls. The ship around him began to let out a groaning, wheezing sound as if it was about to fall apart at any second. Uneasily, Arthur walked back over to his suitcase and took a tentative seat on it. He tried to tune his watch back to the broadcast he had been watching, but it wasn’t working. “Oh, there’s no reception,” he sighed, without meaning to.

“What’s that?” The Doctor was suddenly in front of him. “What’s the problem?”

“Oh, uh, I was watching something, but now I can’t get a signal,” Arthur explained, pointing out his watch.

“Hmmm.” The Doctor pointed her silver device—her ‘sonic,’ had she called it?—at Arthur’s watch, and it lit up again. Once the light had gone off, she held it up in front of her face and peered at it for a moment, before pointing it at a small screen nearby. It lit up, and when the light turned off this time, the screen was suddenly filled with the media event that Arthur had been watching before the thief made off with his case. “There you go.”

“Thank you!” Arthur exclaimed, running over to get the best possible view of the screen. It was so much bigger than his watch! There was Brian Slade in all his glory, in a beautiful gold leather suit, standing before countless cameras, flawless and gorgeous.

“Are the rumours true that you and Curt Wild have some sort of plans up your sleeve?” one of the men off-camera shouted.

“Oh yes,” Brian answered, with a suave smile. “Quite soon actually we plan to take over the galaxy!”

“What was that?!” the Doctor exclaimed, and Arthur could hear her feet hurrying over, even as the media men surrounding Brian started laughing.

“It was just a joke,” Arthur told her.

“He doesn’t look like he was joking.”

Indeed, Brian’s face on the screen looked crestfallen. “It’s just that he doesn’t like that they don’t take him seriously,” Arthur assured her.

The Doctor was still scowling at the screen. Did she really think Brian was serious? Or was it actually…was she every bit as bad as Arthur’s father…?

Soon Curt Wild appeared on the screen, too, wearing a silver leather suit to match Brian’s golden one. As always, Arthur’s heart leapt on seeing them together. They were so magnificent! If only he could…somehow…

After a few beautiful words of love, Curt leaned in to kiss Brian, and the whole universe faded away for Arthur. Nothing existed outside of their love. Except maybe his faint inkling of jealousy. He would never be part of something so perfect, no matter how much he wanted it…

When the kiss ended, Arthur realised that the Doctor had wandered back to the console, either bored or disgusted by what had so entranced him. “Any particular part of Xeno 3 you want to go to?” the Doctor asked, when she saw him looking at her.

“Um, well, Brian and Curt—the men on the screen there—they’re going to give a concert in a bit under a week,” Arthur told her. “In the capital.” He shrugged. “I’ll miss the concert in transit, but I was hoping if I went to the capital I might at least catch a glimpse of them before they move on to the next city on their tour.” Maybe, if he was _really_ lucky, he could get a job in some menial capacity for them, so he could go along with them on their tour.

“You won’t miss the concert,” the Doctor promised him. “We’ll be landing on Xeno 3 in about half an hour.”

“What, really?”

The Doctor nodded. “It _ought_ to be much sooner, but she’s giving me trouble for some reason. Probably nothing. She’s been around long enough to get uppity sometimes.” As if it understood her, the ship let out a heavy mechanical groan. “Oi, behave yourself!” the Doctor shouted at it. Then she turned a critical gaze at Arthur. “So, why are you travelling all by yourself at your age? You must be, what, fifteen?”

“Eighteen,” Arthur corrected her. “I’m plenty old enough to travel by myself.”

“So, you’re not running away then?”

Arthur had to look away. Was he really so obvious?

“It’s all right, you know,” the Doctor said. “I ran away from home myself when I was a young man. Of course, I didn’t go alone; I had my granddaughter with me.”

Arthur looked back at her sharply. How could she have been ‘young’ and had a granddaughter at the same time? “Uh…” He stopped his question before it even started. It was probably better not to know the answer.

“Leaving the nest is part of everyone’s journey to adulthood,” the Doctor went on, looking at the instruments on the console as if nothing she was saying was the least bit odd. “Some of us just have to do it a bit more abruptly than others, eh?”

“I guess so…?” As long as she didn’t ask _why_ he had to run away so abruptly…

***

Ace hadn’t been on the planet for two hours, and she was already impatient for the Doctor to get back. It wasn’t that she minded being alone on an alien planet—how could she have minded that when she had so much experience at it?—but the headset she was having to wear to translate for her was a real pain. If this was an Earth colony, why didn’t they still speak English? That place she’d ended up before meeting the Doctor had spoken English. Or did that mean this was even further out in time than that had been? Whatever they were actually speaking, it didn’t sound like any modern Earth language to her, unfortunately, so she couldn’t even try to piece her way around without the translation device.

Maybe she should have insisted on going with the Doctor after all, no matter how “boring” the errand he was running back on his home planet was going to be.

As if the Doctor had heard what she was thinking, the wheezing sound of the TARDIS materializing suddenly started up in an alley not far from where Ace was standing. She ran towards the sound, and got there just as the materialization process finished. It was the TARDIS all right, and yet…something looked different about it. It looked not just cleaner, but somehow _newer_. The proportions were off, too. The Doctor had told her about the broken chameleon circuits before. Had he gotten them fixed while he was at home? That was great and all, but what was he doing landing _here_ and _now_? They had agreed he was going to land the TARDIS by that tourist trap monument a week from now! Ace could have missed him altogether!

Annoyed by the Doctor’s inconsistency, Ace tugged open the door as she yanked that annoying translation headset off. “Here, Professor, what’s the big idea—” She stopped halfway through her exclamation as she went inside and caught sight of the state of the interior of the TARDIS. The space was at least ten times as big as it used to be, the white roundelles replaced with a grimy, steampunk design, and the console looking like it had been cobbled together out of random bits of ancient tech, with dead spider’s legs of glowing crystal curving up around it. “Gordon Bennett, what happened in here?”

“Ace!” A woman shouting her name was the only warning Ace had before she was suddenly enveloped in a huge hug.

Ace struggled out of the other woman’s arms, staring at her in alarm. Looked to be in her thirties, and looked bizarrely happy. “Who are you?” Ace demanded. “Where’s the Doctor?”

“No, it’s me,” the woman said, smiling. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you!”

Ace looked over the woman more closely. She was wearing a bizarre outfit, combining baggy capris with a duster and multi-coloured braces. There weren’t many people Ace had met who had such bad fashion sense. “You don’t…you mean…you’re the—you’ve regenerated? In a week!?”

The woman laughed, shaking her head. “No, no, that was quite a while ago. I haven’t been _your_ Doctor for—ooh, thousands of years?”

After a momentary lapse of pure confusion, a lump of betrayal formed in Ace’s stomach. “You mean he—you— _my_ Doctor… _abandoned_ me?!”

“What?” The woman looked confused, then she smiled warmly, and took one of Ace’s hands. “Of course not!” she exclaimed. “This isn’t how or where we parted ways.” She paused a moment, letting go again. “Wait, my younger self isn’t on this planet right now, is he? I can’t imagine the TARDIS allowing that.”

Ace shook her head. “No, he left me here while he went to go back to Gallifrey. He said he was just running an errand. I thought maybe he was telling the other Time Lords about what happened with the Master.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that,” the woman said, nodding. “Of course.” She laughed. “Don’t worry, Ace. I just didn’t remember that was Xeno 3. I promise you, my younger self is going to show up at the rendezvous point right on time.” She paused a moment. “No, actually, he’ll be about a half an hour late. Maybe an hour. But basically on time. And only a few hundred yards off course.”

Ace laughed. “For the TARDIS, that’s not bad.”

“Exactly!” The other woman’s smile faded. “But don’t tell him about running into me, all right? I never knew before that I was going to regenerate this way, so it would be a terrible paradox if I found out.”

“Right.” Was that because this was _really_ a future version of the Doctor, or was this some other Time Lord whose TARDIS was in the shape of a police box so she could _pretend_ to be the Doctor? Ace wasn’t quite sure how to tell the difference.

“Um, excuse me?” Another unfamiliar voice distracted Ace from her suspicions. A _very_ pretty boy about her age walked up. His clothes were a bit mismatched and very rumpled; from what Ace had seen on the streets in the few hours she had spent on this planet, she was sure they were extremely unfashionable. Even in the distant future, some people still got stuck with clothes their mum had bought for them, apparently. “Did we miss the Brian Slade concert?”

Ace smiled, and shook her head. “No, that’s four days out still.”

“That’s amazing!” He looked at the Time Lord—Time Lady?—with awe. “We really did get here the same day, all the way from Xeno 10!”

“I told you!” The woman smiled, and gestured to Ace. “Anyway, this is Dorothy McShane—Ace—one of my very best ever friends. And Ace, this is—”

“Arthur Stuart,” the boy said, offering her a hand to shake.

Ace accepted his hand, but was looking more at the other woman than at the boy. Pretty boys could wait until she knew if she was with a friend or an enemy. “Very best ever friends?” she repeated. She couldn’t imagine the Doctor ever talking like that…

The woman nodded. “Right up there with Jamie and Romana and Sarah Jane and Jo and the Brigad—”

“Yes, I don’t need the whole list,” Ace sighed. The fact that this woman knew so many of the Doctor’s former companions—though she hadn’t heard him mention a Jamie before—didn’t seem terribly convincing. If she was a rogue Time Lord impersonating him, she’d have had to do that much research just to know Ace’s full name. “Say, how _is_ the Brigadier these days?” she asked. How much research would an imposter have put in…?

The smile fell away from the woman’s face. “I…he’s gone.”

“What, really? But he seemed so full of vigour for an old guy!”

The woman smiled sadly. “Oh, it was decades after you met him. Died in bed with his children keeping watch over him. Still…finding out about it when I did…no, I suppose it would have hurt no matter when it was. He was my oldest friend.” She laughed. “Sounds odd, doesn’t it? A mere human and all, but…Jamie and Victoria and I met him in the London Underground, back when it was under attack by the Yeti.”

“Yeah, you told me about that,” Ace said, laughing along. He hadn’t mentioned his companions by name, but the Doctor had told her about the mechanical Yeti. Sounded like a riot, no matter how much he tried to stress that they had been terribly dangerous. Some of the Doctor’s enemies were just impossible to take seriously if you didn’t see them in person.

Arthur cleared his throat. “Is it far from here to the concert grounds?” he asked, looking self-conscious about breaking into their conversation.

“Not far,” Ace assured him. “Are you a fan?”

Arthur nodded eagerly.

“You don’t look like one.”

He winced. “I will, though. Once I get some money for better clothes.”

“Oh, I’ve got other clothes you can borrow,” the Doctor—if she really was the Doctor—said, brightening up. “Down the corridor, third left, second right, up the stairs, fourth door on the left. Can’t miss it.”

“Sounds like it’s moved a lot closer than it used to be,” Ace commented, even as Arthur’s eyes swam. “C’mon, I’ll take you,” she added, taking his hand. Not every day she got to hold hands with someone so good-looking! He didn’t react at all, though. Then again, if he was a Brian Slade fan, maybe he liked boys? That’d be about Ace’s luck, all right…

The corridors they passed through on the way to the wardrobe looked like some of the ones that hid in the bowels of the TARDIS; some of them were crude metal, and others were brick or plaster. They looked nothing like the gleaming white halls that were near the console room of the TARDIS Ace knew. Then again, the console room was no longer gleaming white, either, so that didn’t necessarily mean much.

The wardrobe itself was greatly relieving to Ace. It was the same room she knew. She was sure it was. Not only did she recognize some of the gear—that massive scarf, the clown coat, shirts with frilly sleeves, and a great deal of much nicer women’s clothing than the Doctor was currently wearing—but she recognized the room itself, every shelf and rod in just the same place. Even the splinters seemed to be in the same place. Then this really was _her_ TARDIS after all. Maybe she shouldn’t have doubted it. After all, it had let her in so easily.

Arthur began eagerly picking through the clothes, disappearing into a changing stall with a huge armful of them.

“So, how did you get the Doctor to give you a ride here to see the concert?” Ace asked him, once the door had shut behind him. “Or are you his—sorry, her—current travelling companion?”

“She helped me get my bag back from a thief, but then I’d missed my shuttle. Um, was she really a man when you knew her?”

“Yeah. Pretty old, too. I used to call him Professor, ‘cause he reminded me of my teachers at school.” She paused, thinking about what Arthur looked like. He was _about_ her age, probably. Could have been as old as early twenties, though. “Are you still in school, too?” she asked, since she had never properly finished school. Even if she hadn’t left Earth the way she did, she wouldn’t have—well, if she’d have gone to uni at all, she wouldn’t be done with it yet.

“Um…” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Not…anymore…”

Ace laughed. “I think we’re in the same boat,” she said. “Better things to do, yeah?”

“Yeah.” A ripping sound came from the stall. “Uh-oh…I think I ruined this. Will she be cross?”

“Not if you don’t tell her about it. The Doctor doesn’t spend much time in here. As you can tell by the way she dresses.”

Arthur laughed from inside the changing stall. “So, um, are you a Brian Slade fan, too?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly a fan,” Ace said. “Never heard of him until my Doctor dropped me off on Xeno 3. But there’s adverts for his concert all over the place, and everyone’s playing his music constantly. I was planning on going to the concert if I could get a ticket. I like the music.” Though she hadn’t been able to understand the lyrics, since her headset wasn’t up to the challenge. “His style reminds me of all that glam stuff from the early ‘70s, you know?”

The door to the stall opened, and Arthur stepped out, a confused look on his face. “What does that mean? Early seventy what?”

“Huh? Um…you know, the 1970s?”

Arthur shook his head. “Never heard of it before. What is it?”

“It’s a decade.”

He just looked more confused.

“You know, on Earth?”

“I always thought Earth was just a myth.”

Ace sighed. “It’s not a myth. I was born there.”

“Wow, really?”

“Yes, really.” Ace shook her head. “Just forget about it.” She didn’t want to have to give him the full rundown on her lousy life on Earth. Instead, she turned a critical eye to the clothes Arthur had picked out to wear. He seemed to be wearing the same trousers he had been earlier, but now he was wearing a white silk shirt with frilly sleeves over it. “Is that what you’re wearing?” she asked.

Arthur shook his head. “No, I need something else to go with this blouse,” he said, returning his attention to the clothes around them. “Haven’t found just the right one yet.”

As he disappeared between two of the racks of clothes, Ace got the feeling she was going to be in there waiting a very long time…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that's not where the clothing depository was located in the season opener, but since I'm pretending the entire season just didn't happen, I didn't see any reason to go back and change this.


	2. Chapter 2

Arthur had almost given up. There were so many clothes, but so few of them had any style at all! Better than what he had in his suitcase, yes, but…well, it wasn’t as though he was going to have any chance of meeting Brian himself, after all. Surely he could find something good enough to make himself acceptable to the other fans. And maybe to some stagehand who could give him a job backstage…

Moving deeper into the mishmash of a closet, just past a small rack of togas, he found a rack of ladies’ evening gowns and such, most of them in odd styles he’d never seen before. As he examined them, he was delighted to find one that had a bolero jacket, deep blue with silver sequins. It had been huge compared to the dress—must have been very loose-fitting—so he was just barely able to pull it on. It was too tight in the shoulders and much too short, but when he found his way to the nearest mirror to check it out, Arthur liked the way it looked. It was almost good enough for Brian. (If it had actually fit him properly, it _would_ have been good enough for Brian, he was sure.)

Satisfied that he now looked good enough to show himself in front of other fans, Arthur made his way back out to where Ace was waiting for him. She made a little hiccoughing sound that Arthur was quite positive was her forcibly restraining herself from laughing. “Definitely like glam,” she said, with a warm smile. “You going with that, then?”

Arthur nodded, unsure of just what her comment actually meant, whether it was good or bad. She definitely thought he looked silly, but did anyone else share her opinion? Her own clothes were far from fashionable, after all; a denim skirt over thick tights, and a baggy black jacket covered with random patches. Not dressed as oddly as the Doctor, but just as clearly out of touch with Xeno society. But if she wasn’t lying about having been born on Earth, then she wasn’t just far from home, but far from her own time, too; if Earth had ever really existed, it was long gone by now.

“Let’s get back, then,” Ace said.

Despite the many confusing turns along the way—not to mention the bewildering changes in architectural style and construction material—Ace didn’t seem to have any difficulty leading him back to the huge room right inside the door. When they got back, they found the Doctor watching the same programme Arthur had been watching earlier; she must have been recording it, because they returned right on the same question being posed to Brian.

“Quite soon actually we plan to take over the galaxy!”

“They _what_?!” Ace exclaimed, running over to the Doctor’s side. “Is he serious?”

“Of course he’s not!” Arthur insisted, following her.

“He looks serious,” both women said, in almost perfect unison.

“He’s not,” Arthur repeated. “He’s an artist! How would he ever take over anything other than the music scene?”

“Well, that’s true,” Ace said, then frowned, looking back at the television screen. “Then again, America’s got an actor for a president right now,” she said, shaking her head. “Not much difference between a singing star and an acting one.”

The Doctor let out a sad chuckle. “It got even worse a few decades later,” she said, shaking her head. “Americans never learn.”

“That’s why they’re Americans,” Ace said, laughing.

“What’s an American?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Doctor said. “Countries stopped existing many millennia before your time.” She rewound the recording, and it played through the same question and answer again. The recording froze on the look of disappointment on Brian’s face as the surrounding journalists all started laughing. “I can’t see that expression without thinking he’s serious.”

“Yeah.” Ace turned to look at the Doctor. “You want to go see what they’re up to, don’t you?”

“Can’t have anyone trying to take over the galaxy,” the Doctor said, turning off the recording. “Don’t you think?”

Ace smiled. “Not like you to stop them before they start. My Doctor doesn’t tend to act until shots are already flying through the air.”

“Only because I always got there too late to stop them starting to make trouble in the first place.”

“That’s certainly the truth,” Ace said with a sigh. “Let’s go, then.”

“It’s not that easy to just walk up to a big star like Brian Slade,” Arthur pointed out. “Even if he has the free time to talk to you—and so close to a concert he can’t possibly!—but even if he did, he’s got bodyguards and hangers-on and all sorts of people who won’t let you get anywhere near.”

“Oh, I’m good at talking my way past people like that,” the Doctor assured him, with a blithe smile. “Come on then, let’s go!”

She charged out the door without waiting for the other two, though Ace was right behind her anyway. Arthur ran after them, praying they wouldn’t do anything to offend Brian.

He nearly ploughed into them right outside the ship, because they had come to a dead stop. “I just forgot—I don’t know where we’re going,” the Doctor said with an unconcerned laugh. “Do you know where the concert is being held?” she asked, looking at Ace.

“Yeah, it’s on all the posters. Follow me.”

Ace set out at a fast walk, with the Doctor right beside her. Arthur quickly shut the door to the ship behind him, then hurried after them. The streets were filled with heavy pedestrian traffic, so they had to slow down dramatically as soon as they left the alley.

“I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with that translation set anymore,” Ace commented with a laugh. “But everyone sounded the same through the headset, and now these people all sound American,” she said, gesturing to the Xeno 3 locals, “yet Arthur and that Brian both sound English. Why is that, Doctor? Are they speaking different languages?”

“Of course we’re not!” Arthur exclaimed. “People on Xeno 3 just talk differently.”

“It’s part accent, part dialect,” the Doctor said. “I suppose the TARDIS’s translation matrix decided that was the easiest way to make the difference apparent to you.” She paused a moment. “Xeno 10 _is_ the older colony world. Took the original Earth ships longer to get further into the system. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

“Wish that translation thing would work when the TARDIS is out of range,” Ace sighed.

“Technically, it can only work directly when you’re inside. You need me—or any Time Lord, really—to relay the telepathic signal when you’re not inside.”

Ace turned a perplexed look at the Doctor. “Are you saying you’re like a TV broadcasting tower?”

The Doctor laughed. “Not exactly. A satellite for cell phone signals is more apt, but you don’t really know much about cell phones yet.”

Ace looked ahead again for almost half a block. “You know, you’ve never taken me to visit Earth’s near future,” she commented. “Only the past, and things centuries out.”

“It’s in too much flux. Unstable.” The Doctor’s voice sounded hesitant. “My actions tend to cause changes. The ripple effect, you understand. When I was younger, I visited your time, and it was completely different—you wouldn’t recognise it if you could see it. International space programs sending up rockets to visit other planets.”

“Rockets, not space shuttles?” Ace asked. “Like, Apollo 11 kind of rockets?”

“Exactly.”

“Gordon Bennett…”

“Um, what _are_ you talking about?” Arthur cut in. “I haven’t understood a word of your conversation this whole time.”

“Oh, sorry. It’s nothing,” the Doctor said, smiling at him.

Thankfully, that was the end of their mystifying conversation—it had sounded like it was half in code to Arthur—and they walked on in silence until they approached the concert hall. It was a huge venue, with posters for the concert along all the walls, and silent holograms of Brian and Curt in performance were playing in the sky above the hall, extending for countless meters above the city.

“Too bad they’re so subtle about it,” the Doctor said. “Never know there was a concert coming up, would you?” At least, that was what Arthur thought she said. It was hard to hear her, because of the excited chatter coming from a knot of people at one of the doors of the concert hall.

Since everyone in the clustered group was dressed up in Brian’s style, Arthur eagerly headed towards them, hoping that maybe Brian or Curt was at the stage door, signing autographs. As he got nearer, he saw there was no such luck: the door was closed, and there was no one standing in front of it facing the crowd.

Arthur came to a disappointed stop back a meter or so from the crowd, but that didn’t stop the Doctor. She marched right up to the crowd and politely asked them to step aside for her. And for some unfathomable reason, they all did. It wasn’t that she was in any way an imposing figure—she was well shorter than Arthur, and even thinner than he was, too—and it wasn’t that she sounded angry or commanding. She just seemed to have some sort of air that made people do as she said. Whatever the reason, Arthur and Ace both hurried along in her wake, and the three of them had soon reached the stage door itself.

The door revealed the cause of the commotion. There was a poster on it announcing that Brian had decided he needed to add some back-up artists for a few numbers in the upcoming concert, and so he would be holding auditions for the next two days. The more exotic the instrument, the better, according to the poster.

If only Arthur played an instrument! Imagine getting to be on the stage with Brian and Curt, seeing them so close that he could reach out and touch them…

“Hey, that’s brilliant!” the Doctor exclaimed. “Let’s join the band!”

“Sounds good to me,” Ace replied, “but I don’t really play any instruments. Do you?”

Arthur wasn’t sure if she was asking him or the Doctor, but he shook his head, just in case she meant him.

“Oh, loads of them,” the Doctor said. “Let’s get back to the TARDIS for now.”

***

Evidently, there was also a music room on the TARDIS. That was, in all honesty, news to Ace. It had a vast array of musical instruments, from tiny things like pan pipes to a massive pipe organ. The Doctor sat down on the bench of a harpsichord and ran her fingers across the keyboard. “Hmm, needs a tuning,” she commented.

“Bit too 18th century, as well,” Ace sighed. “Not mention hard to shift.”

“How about a lyre?” the Doctor suggested as she got up again. “I’ve got one from Nero’s court around here somewhere.”

“No!”

“Oh, of course!” The Doctor grabbed an electric guitar that had been half-hidden behind the harpsichord. “My prior regeneration really loved guitar. I think I’ve still got the knack.” She played a few chords. Not bad, actually.

“Brian’s already got loads of guitarists,” Arthur suddenly said. Ace hadn’t even realised he had followed them into the music room. “And you haven’t got a patch on Curt. He’s the best guitarist in the galaxy.”

“I doubt that,” the Doctor sighed, putting the guitar down again, “but I suppose it’s not very exotic, is it?”

“Not in the least.”

The Doctor frowned, and set about investigating the shelves.

Ace turned to look at Arthur. “So, this Curt Wild, is he just part of the band? What I’ve seen about him has been sort of vague.”

“Curt Wild is one of the biggest of Xeno 3’s stars, and Brian Slade is the biggest of Xeno 10’s singing stars,” Arthur said, sounding annoyed that she didn’t know. “They met about a year ago, and started performing together.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “I’m not sure if they started seeing each other before they started working together or after.”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Ace said, shrugging. It was all so different from Earth in her time! None of her mates would have bought any records performed by a male star who was sleeping with another man. Not knowingly, anyway. Maybe she hadn’t been much different than her friends were before she left Earth, but time and space travel was even more broadening of the mind than regular travel. When she’d seen the recordings of Brian and Curt kissing, it hadn’t repelled her at all. Their obvious passion had seemed rather touching, in fact.

Arthur looked uneasy with her response, enough so that Ace momentarily wondered if she should explain what she had meant by it. But that would have been silly, surely, so she didn’t bother, and they lapsed into silence until the Doctor turned back to them.

“I’ve got it!” she exclaimed, lifting a blue-and-white-striped recorder to her lips and playing a brief tune.

“You’re not a primary school student,” Ace said, trying not to sound quite as appalled as she felt. Though she realised that complaining too much might make the Doctor try to play the spoons…

“What sort of thing is that?” Arthur asked, looking at the recorder. “Is it some kind of woodwind?”

“It’s related to them,” the Doctor told him. “This is plenty exotic, if he doesn’t know what it is. Let’s go audition!”

“Yes, but what about the rest of us?” Ace asked. “You aren’t planning to leave us behind, are you?” _Her_ Doctor would never have done that…

“We’ll think of something,” the Doctor promised, already on her way out the door.

No matter how she grimaced about this new version of the Doctor being so impulsive, Ace had to admit that she could see glimmers of the Doctor she knew shining through beneath. He always loved to go charging into anything mysterious or dangerous. That was one of the things that made travelling with him so much fun, after all. It’s just that he rarely showed so much glee about it, and certainly never such _childish_ glee.

She and Arthur didn’t quite catch up to the Doctor until they’d gotten all the way back to the concert hall. By that point, a huge queue had formed of people at the stage door, most of them carrying instruments of some sort. The Doctor hesitated, looking at the queue. “Think I should skip the queue?” she asked.

“You can’t do that,” Ace told her, shaking her head. “We can queue up like the rest of them.”

“Don’t like standing around waiting,” the Doctor sighed, even as they took their places. “And what if the position is filled before we get there?”

“It looked like they wanted more than one,” Arthur pointed out.

“How would you even _manage_ to skip the queue?” Ace asked. “Surely you don’t think you could lie your way past them with claims of being a famous musician.”

“It worked at Nero’s court,” the Doctor said, before rubbing her head thoughtfully. “Though of course they had mistaken me for that poor murdered fellow all on their own, and I just encouraged their mistake after the fact.” She shrugged. “There’s always the psychic paper.”

“The _what_?” Ace exclaimed.

“Oh, yes, I didn’t have it yet back in your day, did I?” The Doctor smiled, and pulled out a little black object that looked like it held the badge of a television detective. Within it was a blank sheet of paper. “This is psychic paper,” she explained. “Shows anything I want or need it to.”

“Gordon Bennett! That must be useful.”

“Oh, it is.”

“Almost seems like cheating, though,” Ace added, shaking her head. “We’ve always made do without anything like that.”

“Things move faster now than they used to,” the Doctor said, returning the wallet-like thing to her pocket. “Or maybe it just seems that way, and it’s a sign that I’m getting old.”

“Don’t think _that’s_ it,” Ace said, laughing. “You move much faster than everything else around you.” She also _talked_ a lot faster, too.

“Do I?” Apparently, she wasn’t aware of the fact that everything she did conveyed being in a hurry to get done and go off and do something else. One adventure at a time had always been plenty for Ace’s Doctor…

“You do,” Arthur agreed. “But you don’t have to stay here, if you’re so eager to be elsewhere. You were just coming to bring me to my destination, and I’m safely here now, so—”

“No, I want to talk to this Brian Slade myself,” the Doctor insisted.

“I’m with her on that,” Ace agreed. He _probably_ hadn’t meant anything dangerous by the remark about taking over the galaxy—who would admit that sort of thing in advance?—but what if he did? Better to be safe than to risk seeing a galactic government overthrown. Wait… “Say, Doctor, _is_ there a galactic government at the moment?” Ace wasn’t even entirely sure what galaxy they were in.

“Of course there is,” Arthur said before the Doctor could answer. His appalled tone matched the appalled looks on the faces of the people in front of them in the queue, who had turned to stare at Ace.

“What?! I’m not from around here!” Ace aimed a challenging glare at the people in front of them. Cowed, they turned around again.

“They call it a galactic government,” the Doctor told her, “but they really only control one arm of the galaxy.” She laughed. “Not the one they came from originally, of course.”

“Arm, or galaxy?”

“Arm. We’re on the opposite side of the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth.” The Doctor looked at her watch, which appeared to Ace to be an ordinary watch capable only of telling the hour. “Where Earth was, I mean.”

“It’s really gone?” Something about the idea put a pit in Ace’s stomach.

“For a while now.” The Doctor shrugged. “Still be there whenever you want to go back,” she added, with a warm smile. “Nice thing about a TARDIS.”

“Yeah.”

The awkward discomfort that filled Ace seemed to spread to the others, and they remained relatively silent—apart from the Doctor tootling on the recorder like a small child—for nearly an hour, in which time they had progressed about halfway along the queue. Even then, the silence was only broken by the Doctor asking Arthur about Brian Slade’s music, not so much about the songs themselves as detailed musical questions about tempo and key. To Ace’s surprise, Arthur was actually able to answer the questions in detail. Ace wouldn’t have been able to list any of that information for any of the musicians whose work she listened to back home. Then again, she hadn’t really been keen enough on any of them to consider herself much of a ‘fan,’ not the way Arthur and these other people evidently were for this Brian Slade.

The one thing Ace had noticed in common about all the people in the queue ahead of them was that every one of them left again looking dejected. Whatever else he was, Brian Slade was apparently quite fussy about his back-up performers. Though Ace wondered how much the appearance of the rejected musicians had to do with it; many of them were physically unattractive, and would hardly have complemented Slade’s band on stage visually. (Given how little time there was for them to learn whatever music they were to be expected to play, their appearances surely had to be the most important factor!)

After another hour of mind-numbing waiting, it was finally the Doctor’s turn to audition. The bouncer looked at the three of them as they approached together, a wary look on his face, then he sighed, and gestured them through without a word. They followed signs down a short corridor to a stage where a drum set waited in the background. It was a typical classic drum set that could have gone with any rock band all the way back to the ‘60s, maybe even the ‘50s. A bit disappointing, this being so far in the future, Ace thought.

“Are you all three auditioning?” a woman asked, looking at them sceptically. The woman was probably in her early twenties, with mousy brown hair and unremarkable features. “What are your names and instruments?”

“I’m the Doctor, and I’ll be playing recorder. These are my friends, Ace and Arthur.”

“Friends?” the woman repeated, her voice filled with disgust. “You don’t get to have an entourage.”

“Oh, let them be, Shannon,” a man’s voice said from the audience area. Even if Arthur hadn’t gasped and turned in the direction of the voice, Ace recognised it from the recordings as that of Brian Slade. Sure enough, he was sitting in the front row of the seating area off-stage, wearing an iridescent dressing gown over shiny black trousers. “What’s the harm in it when they’re both so pleasing to the eye?”

Ace was ashamed to feel her cheeks heat at the compliment, but she hoped she wasn’t blushing as much as Arthur was: he had turned beet red, with a silly grin all over his face. Silly, but also rather charming. From the mildly lecherous smile on his own face, apparently Slade had similar thoughts about Arthur’s grin…

Shannon let out a quiet noise of disgust. Ace glanced over at her and saw an expression that betrayed an even greater disgust, and perhaps even a bit of jealousy. She was writing something on a thin metal object rather like a clipboard, though Ace didn’t see a clip on it anywhere. “All right, go ahead and play your audition piece,” Shannon said, looking at the Doctor with a challenge in her eyes.

Undaunted, the Doctor lifted the recorder to her lips and played “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.” By the time she was done, Brian Slade was on his feet, headed to the stairs up onto the stage. He remained silent until he was on the stage and standing within a few feet of them.

“Not bad,” he said, nodding. “Know anything more up-tempo?”

The Doctor nodded, and played another tune, one Ace didn’t know. It was a much faster beat, yet it worked surprisingly well on the recorder.

“You write either of those?” Slade asked.

The Doctor laughed. “No, no, not at all. The first one’s an old tune from the Renaissance.”

“It thought it was Simon and Garfunkel,” Ace said.

“They only re-orchestrated it,” the Doctor assured her. “The second one was Prince.” She paused, looking at Slade curiously. “Was I expected to be playing something I had written myself?”

“No, not at all.” Slade shook his head. “Most of the people ahead of you were playing my songs. Just wondered if they were things I could use myself.”

“The copyright’s long expired on them,” the Doctor replied, “but it might not be very ethical to use them.”

Slade nodded, then glanced over at Ace and Arthur. “And do either of you play instruments?”

Ace shook her head. She had some experience, but nothing good enough to play in front of others.

“I could lug things about,” Arthur exclaimed, his voice breaking slightly. “Anything to be useful!”

Slade chuckled, and gave the boy a piercing once-over. “I’m sure I can find something for you to do,” he said, a suave desire in his voice that made Arthur flush an even deeper crimson.

“Sounds pretty quiet in there,” another man’s voice said from the backstage area. He sounded American to Ace’s ears. “Finally done with those shit auditions?”

“Mind your manners, Curt!” Slade shouted back, his voice warm and jovial. “We’ve actually found a good one. Come out and meet her.”

Curt Wild emerged onto the stage with a bemused expression. The shoulder-length, bleached blond hair that apparently flew wild in every one of his performances was now pulled back into a low ponytail, though what must have once been his fringe was still obscuring part of his face. He was wearing a shirt and trousers no different from what the normal people in the street wore.

At the moment he appeared, from beside Ace came a slight sound. Glancing over at Arthur, she realised the sound must have been him catching his breath: he was now staring at Wild with an unashamed desire, seemingly oblivious to everyone and everything else around him. Wild’s eyes passed over the three of them, and lingered on Arthur, a grin crossing his lips before he turned back to Slade. “Which one is it?” he asked.

“The blonde,” Slade replied.

Wild frowned before turning back to the Doctor. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

The Doctor raised her recorder to her lips again, and played a piece by the Police.

Wild nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

“You’ve got the job,” Slade informed her, smiling charmingly.

“And what do you play?” Wild asked, looking at Arthur.

Arthur stammered something that didn’t quite contain any words.

“Those two will joining the entourage on a more…fluid basis,” Slade informed him. Ace did _not_ like the implications of that statement, not one bit. If he thought she was going to allow him to do anything he wanted to her just because he was apparently quite the big celebrity, he was in for a very rude awakening.

Wild nodded, his eyes still locked on Arthur.

While Slade and Shannon began listing various technical and financial details they would need to know as part of Slade’s crew, Ace moved closer to the Doctor, and gave her a brief nudge with her elbow, before gesturing to Arthur with a jerk of her head. “Think someone’s got a bit of a crush,” she whispered.

“Oh?” The Doctor not only was not amused, she didn’t seem to notice. Typical Doctor. Ace had been a fool to expect that becoming a woman would make the Doctor any more aware that humans had feelings that did _not_ involve alien invasions.

“Any questions?” Slade asked, evidently having finished the briefing while Ace wasn’t paying attention.

“Yes,” the Doctor replied. “Are you really planning—”

Ace shoved her to shut her up. Had she forgotten that subtlety existed? “Anything else we need to know about the band’s plans going forward, Mr. Slade?” she asked, trying to cover the massive gaffe. “Like, are we going to be joining you on tours or anything?”

“Please, no need for formality. Just Brian is fine. And for the moment you’re just here for the upcoming concert. I’ll decide after that if you’ll be joining on a more permanent basis.” He turned to Shannon. “Show them to some rooms they can use, Shannon.”

“Of course.” She smiled warmly at Brian, then turned a much colder look at the three of them, as if they were nothing but unwanted interlopers. Which was probably exactly what she thought of them, Ace reflected. “If you’ll follow me.”

Shannon led them through the concert hall to a separate wing of the building, where a row of doors extended along a corridor, looking for all the world like a hotel. “You can use this suite here,” she said, after they’d walked about half the length of it.

“That’s splendid,” the Doctor said, smiling at her. “Is this a dressing room, or…?”

Shannon scowled. “Brian has rented out the entire structure. These are full suites. You’ll be staying in them _and_ using them as your dressing room.” She unlocked the door, and handed a card to the Doctor. “Don’t lose your key. You’ll be fitted for a costume in the morning.” With that, Shannon left again, without waiting to see if anyone had any questions.

“I’m not sure I want to share a suite…” Arthur grumbled, biting his lip as soon as he was finished speaking.

“None of us do,” Ace assured him. None of them other than the Doctor, of course, who had already gone inside and was investigating the suite thoroughly. By the time Ace and Arthur followed her inside, she was aiming some sort of electronic device at a bowl of fruit. “What _are_ you doing?”

“Just checking for bugs. Never know.”

“I’m sure there aren’t any vermin in someplace this fancy,” Arthur said.

“I don’t think she means that kind of bugs,” Ace sighed. “But I really doubt they’d bother spying on us.”

“Probably not,” the Doctor agreed. “It’s _us_ who need to find out what _they_ ’re up to.”

“ _If_ they’re up to something, you mean,” Ace said. “Just because he seemed to be serious doesn’t mean he’s really planning something wicked. I mean, what if he just meant they’ll be standing for election next time the galactic government elects its Prime Minister or President or whatever they have?”

“I don’t think Brian’s old enough for that,” Arthur said. “You have to be forty, don’t you?”

Ace shrugged. “Seeing as I don’t even know what the post is called, how could I know?”

“It’s Premiere,” the Doctor told her, “and I think it’s thirty-five. Or was that President of America?”

“…kind of a big difference there….” Ace sighed.

The Doctor shrugged. “Who’s up for some exploring?”

“Oh, always!” Ace smiled. “Bet there’s all sorts of things to discover around here, even if there’s nothing going on that’s going to require us to intervene.” And who could know if she’d ever get to be backstage during the preparations for a major rock concert again!


	3. Chapter 3

Arthur hadn’t been entirely sure if he should follow them when the Doctor and Ace left the room to go “exploring,” but just sitting around doing nothing hadn’t seemed like much fun, so he had tagged along. Besides, maybe if he went with them he’d get to see Curt again.

No, no, what was he even thinking?!

Arthur was so cross with himself that he had to fight back the urge to slap himself to return to sanity. No matter how much he had been blown away by Curt’s raw sensuality, he had no right to covet him. Curt belonged to Brian. They were so beautiful together. It wouldn’t be right for a nothing like him to try to come between them.

Unless they both wanted him between them…

This time, Arthur _did_ strike himself to drive that mental image out of his brain. The last thing he wanted was to suddenly be walking down the corridor with a stiffy…

“Is something wrong?” the Doctor asked.

“Just…um…nothing.” Arthur shook his head weakly, and tried to smile.

Astonishingly, she seemed to accept that, and resumed walking. As he fell into step beside her, Ace cast a curious glance in his direction. Not sure how to react, Arthur turned his face away from her. She couldn’t read his expression if she couldn’t see it, right?

At the end of the corridor, they came to a junction where the lift was, as well as the door back into the concert hall. The Doctor turned to look at the other two. “What do you think?” she asked. “Lift, or back into the hall?”

“We’d just get in the way in the venue,” Arthur objected. “I’m sure they’re setting up for the concert and doing other technical things.”

“We’ll probably learn more from the rooms, anyway,” Ace added. “As far as I can tell from the video feeds I’ve seen on this planet, it seems like Brian travels with quite a large retinue. They can’t all be up to it in preparations. Some of them will surely talk to us. Maybe let something slip.”

“The lift it is, then.” The Doctor turned and pressed the button to call the lift. The door opened almost immediately, and the three of them piled inside. It must not have been the lift used to transport luggage and instruments; it was almost crowded just with the three of them. “Up or down?” the Doctor asked. “Shall we put it to a vote?”

“Up sounds good to me,” Ace said. “That’s where the important people will be.”

The Doctor turned an inquisitive look at Arthur, but he couldn’t do anything other than shrug. He didn’t really care where they went. He just wanted to find something more happening than the suite he had been randomly assigned to share with two strange _women_.

“Up it is, then.” The Doctor pressed the button for the highest floor, but an error message told her to insert her key card. Once she did so, the lift started moving, but it only went about halfway up before stopping and letting them off. “Seems like we’re not allowed higher than this,” she commented as the doors opened. “Shall we explore this level, or just use my sonic to go all the way up?”

“Let’s stay here,” Arthur insisted, getting off the lift as soon as he finished speaking. Those two could do what they wanted, but _he_ was doing nothing to risk being ejected from his shiny new position as a minor underling riding Brian’s beautiful coattails.

“May as well,” Ace agreed, following him. She looked at the Doctor as the other woman also emerged from the lift. “But what’s this sonic thing?”

The Doctor looked at her with confusion for a moment, then laughed. “That’s right, I’d not rebuilt it yet, had I?” She smiled, and displayed the silver object with the crystal tip. “My sonic screwdriver,” she said.

“Screwdriver?” Ace repeated, a look of disbelief on her face. “What do you use it for, disassembling things?”

“Well, to start with, it was just a screwdriver, only it used sonic vibrations so you didn’t have to put your wrist out turning and turning and turning by hand.” The Doctor shrugged, putting it back in her mysteriously voluminous pocket. “Wasn’t much call for that, so I tinkered with it over the years. For a long time, all it could do was open doors, mostly. Didn’t seem too useful after a while, so when it broke, I guess I did go without for a few regenerations. Eventually built myself a new one, and kept adding functions.”

“Uh-huh. And what’s it do now?”

“Almost everything, really. Scanner, remote control, just about anything.” The Doctor smiled. “Anything short of being a weapon, of course.”

“Of course.” Ace shook her head. “That’s pretty disappointing,” she added.

“What is?”

“You’re relying on some device to get you out of trouble? You’re a woman now. You should be tougher than that.”

The Doctor laughed. “This one’s actually a bit _less_ powerful than the one I had before, back when I was a man.”

Ace shrugged. “My Doctor’s never needed it.”

“I don’t _need_ it. It just frees my attention for the bigger things.”

Ace didn’t look impressed, and the Doctor looked like she wanted to start a real quarrel, so Arthur stepped between them. “Let’s go look for Brian and Curt,” he suggested, with a helpless smile. “Didn’t you want to talk to them?”

“Right, let’s go,” the Doctor agreed, taking off at a fast clip that left the others hurrying after her.

They slowed to a stop when the corridor opened out into a lounge area about halfway down from the lift. The members of Brian’s back-up band were sitting there, one tuning his guitar, and the others surrounded by girls. They looked up at the new arrivals curiously.

“Who are you?” The one with the guitar set it aside, and stood up to look them over.

“I’m the Doctor, and these are Ace and Arthur. Who are you?”

“Trevor Finn, lead guitarist.” Trevor’s eyes narrowed. “Are you supposed to be here?”

“I’ve joined the band, too, temporarily,” the Doctor said. “On recorder.”

“You’re going to be running a camera?”

“It’s an old Earth instrument,” Ace explained.

Trevor nodded. “Brian did say he wanted things old and exotic.” He shook his head, looking disappointed.

“You don’t like that he’s hiring new musicians?” the Doctor asked.

“It’s not that, exactly. Though the song doesn’t really need the extra sound.”

“What is it, then?”

Trevor’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the Doctor. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to know what’s bothering me?”

“If we’re going to be working together, isn’t it only natural I should want to know if there are any underlying tensions?” Somehow, the Doctor made it sound like perfectly normal curiosity, instead of her evidently deep-seated need to find evidence that Brian was up to no good.

Trevor shrugged. “There’s no tensions that will affect you. But if you’re just temporaries, you shouldn’t be up on this floor.”

“Where should we be, then?” Ace asked.

“The other local workers are on the first three floors. And the opening acts are on the fourth. They always seem bored; go pester them.”

“Are we pestering you?” Ace sounded like she wanted to laugh.

“Come on, let’s go,” Arthur urged, setting his hands on their shoulders in an effort to encourage them to turn back towards the lift. After a moment or two, they relented, and all three of them were soon walking back in the direction from which they had come.

“Are you always so obedient?” Ace asked.

“I’d like to stick with the band _after_ the concert,” Arthur told her, trying to change the subject. Of course he was always trying to be good. The less disobedient he was, the better chance he’d have of being accepted… “Can’t do that if you make them cross and include me in it.”

“Suppose not,” Ace admitted, thankfully allowing the subject to be dropped.

Back in the lift, the Doctor pressed the button for the fourth floor without asking anyone else’s opinion. “So, if you’re such a fan, you must know who the opening acts are?” she surmised once it was moving.

Arthur shrugged. “I know Brian uses several of them. There’s a couple of bands he brought with him from Xeno 10, and at least one Xeno 3 band, too. They don’t just open the show, though,” he added, as the lift arrived and they disembarked. “Brian has a lot of elaborate costumes, and he likes to change mid-show. I’ve never been to a concert before, but from the ones I’ve seen broadcast, he usually has another band come out and play a few numbers while he’s changing.”

“And do you know anything about the other bands?”

“Um, one of them.”

“The local one?” the Doctor asked with a surprising eagerness.

Arthur shook his head. “I know they’re called the Late Earlies, but I don’t know anything more than that. It’s one of the Xeno 10 bands I know. They’re from the same city as me, and I almost got to see them in concert, only they cancelled the show because they’d just gotten the offer to tour with Brian.”

“Not very fair to people like you who had concert tickets,” Ace commented.

“I didn’t have tickets,” Arthur admitted. “But I knew the venue, and I thought I might be able to get there without my father finding out.”

“Doesn’t approve of the music?” Ace asked.

“Not so much the music as…” Arthur stopped, biting his lip. “Forget it. Let’s go.”

He turned and started walking down the corridor, mentally pleading with them not to ask for details. He knew that people on Xeno 3 weren’t as disgusted by people like Arthur as his father was—as too many people on Xeno 10 were—but he had no idea what people from other worlds and systems thought about men who loved other men. It wasn’t a good idea to bring the subject up. No point exposing himself to that kind of risk.

The lounge area on the fourth floor seemed a bit larger than the one above, and it was definitely more lively. Music was playing, and about a dozen people in various states of undress were passing drinks between them, or enjoying each others’ company in more intimate ways. Arthur came to a stunned stop just inside the door to the lounge.

Over in one corner along the far wall, a group of men who were more clad than most of the others were sharing a few pint glasses between them. One of them looked up, met Arthur’s eye—or seemed to—and mimed a kiss in his direction. Flustered, Arthur glanced over his shoulders to see if he might have intended it for Ace or the Doctor, but they had both stopped in the hall. There was no way he could have been looking at them from where he was sitting. With a self-conscious smile, Arthur looked back at the man. As soon as he did, he found himself beckoned over.

Eagerly, Arthur picked his way across the room, stepping over a sleeping or unconscious man, and swerving to get around two naked women snogging in the middle of the floor. When Arthur reached the corner and accepted a seat beside the man who had spotted him in the doorway, he was astonished to realise that the four men who were now all smiling at him were the Flaming Creatures, the band he hadn’t gotten to see back home.

Arthur accepted the pint glass being offered to him, and took a drink from it, hoping to give himself a little courage, and maybe to somehow imbibe from it the ability not to make a fool of himself…

***

“Here, Doctor, should we just be leaving him like that?” Ace asked, as she followed the Doctor back down the hall. “An innocent kid like that, and we’re leaving him in the middle of a bleeding orgy?”

“He seemed to want to be there,” the Doctor pointed out, as they arrived back at the lift.

“Yes, but he’s new to all this. Doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

The Doctor looked at her with mild disappointment. “Arthur is in his own time, and in a place he was already going to get to without me. Anything that he’s about to get into, he’d have gotten into if he’d taken the shuttle to get here.”

Ace sighed, nodding. “Suppose so,” she admitted.

“And he’s no more a child than you are.”

“He also seems like he hasn’t been away from his parents for more than twenty-four hours in his life.” Ace, after all, had been living in deep space for a long time before even meeting the Doctor!

“Well, that’s true,” the Doctor agreed, calling the lift. “Still, I don’t think we need to chaperone him.”

“Maybe not.” Against her own will, Ace had to admit inwardly that she might have been a little bit jealous. Even though she already knew Arthur liked boys, there was still the frustration that he was probably the prettiest boy she’d ever met, and he hadn’t so much as spared her a single interested glance. Maybe he wouldn’t have even if he did like girls, but that made it no less galling.

They took the lift back to the ground floor, and returned to the concert hall. The Doctor immediately headed for the stage, but no amount of pointing her “sonic” at the entire stage, the audience area or the drums revealed anything of any interest. Which hardly surprised Ace, because even if Brian was planning on somehow using this particular concert to take over the galaxy in one fell swoop, he’d hardly leave anything incriminating lying about when the concert was still four days away. If he was stupid enough to do that, he’d be stopped without the Doctor’s help.

As the Doctor was expressing her frustration at finding nothing, Ace sighed. “Look, Doctor, why don’t we just go back to the TARDIS and look it up?” she suggested. “You could look up if he’s going to try something.”

The Doctor shook her head. “No, that’s—if I do that, it won’t be in flux anymore. I won’t be able to stop him if I find it written in the history books that he succeeds.”

Ace paused, feeling confused. “On the other hand, you might find it in the history books that you personally stopped him.”

“Oh, yes, I might, mightn’t I?” The Doctor smiled excitedly. “I’ll have to look it up when we’re done here.”

“But we could look now, and—”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Ace frowned. “It’s just…this is really boring, Doctor. Skulking about looking for signs that he _might_ be up to something.”

“You saw how serious he was on that broadcast. He plans to take over the galaxy.”

“And he might be planning on doing it legally. Or he might have given up when they laughed at him like that. Or maybe they just talk about it and haven’t got even the slightest idea how to go about it and will never actually try no matter how serious they are about wanting to!” Ace paused, hoping for some sign that she was getting through. She didn’t see one. “Doctor, do you have any idea how many drugs the average rock star takes? They’re probably off their gourd most of the time. I doubt they’re capable of anything that would require your intervention.”

“He seemed pretty sober at the auditions.”

“Well, that’s true…”

“Besides, can’t you just _feel_ it? That sensation at the back of your gut, the unprovoked acceleration of your hearts? That little nagging whisper behind your mind, telling you we’re needed here?”

“No, don’t feel a thing. Sorry.” Idly, Ace wondered if her Doctor felt anything corny like that. She didn’t want to know enough to ask and risk the disappointment of a positive answer, though.

“Well, I do. There’s no question but that something’s going on. Just not on this stage.” The Doctor pocketed her mechanical magic wand and looked around. “We need to talk to him, I think. Let’s see if we can find him.”

“He’ll be busy preparing for the show,” Ace reminded her. “I doubt he’ll be willing to waste his time talking to us.”

“How long could it take?”

Resigned to the humiliation that she knew was directly in their path, Ace followed the Doctor into the wings of the stage, and up another lift to a floor filled with sound-proofed practice areas and recording booths. Inside one of those, Brian Slade was sitting at a piano (not even a futuristic space-piano!) with a set of half-written sheet music. Curt Wild was sitting on a nearby chair, watching him, until he glanced up and saw the Doctor heading straight for them.

Hastily, Curt got to his feet and left the recording booth, planting himself in the Doctor’s path. “I’d like to speak to Brian,” she told him.

“You can see he’s busy.” Curt sounded more than a little cross, and Ace didn’t blame him for it.

“It’ll just take a minute.”

“Look, he’s busy writing a new orchestration of the song so _you_ can play it on your weird fucking instrument, so you’re not gonna disturb him. You can talk to him tomorrow at rehearsal.”

“But—”

“No buts.” Curt forcibly turned the Doctor by her shoulders. “Keep out of Brian’s way while he’s writing. Nothing pisses him off faster than being interrupted while he’s working on his music.” He started prodding her back towards the lift.

“Come on, Doctor,” Ace agreed. “One day waiting won’t hurt you.” Shouldn’t do, anyway.

“Just sit around waiting?” The Doctor’s tone made it sound like she thought it on the level of torture.

“There’s all the streaming videos you could want in the hotel rooms,” Curt said, prodding her again. “And you don’t have to wait in the hotel. Go out and see the city. Long as you’re back in time for your fitting tomorrow morning, no one gives a shit where you go in the mean time.”

The Doctor turned to look at him. “Do you always swear so much?”

“Usually a lot more. Just get moving.” Curt was starting to sound tired.

“Let’s go, Doctor,” Ace said, tugging on her wrist.

The Doctor sighed exaggeratedly. “All right, but only if you answer my questions,” she said, looking at Curt.

“Fine, I’ll answer whatever the fuck you want, but only on the walk to the elevator.”

Gloomily, the Doctor started walking. Curt kept pace on one side of her, and Ace on the other. “I saw that interview that was broadcast earlier today,” the Doctor said. “Are you two really planning on taking over the galaxy?”

Ace winced; the direct route was not always the best…

Curt, however, laughed. “Is _that_ why you came up here?”

“Answer the question.”

“Come on, how the fuck would we do that? We’re musicians, not warlords.” Curt shook his head. “You can’t say you’ve never sat around with someone you’re close to and talked about how much better you could make life if you were the one running everything.”

“I can absolutely say that,” the Doctor said.

Curt looked so surprised by the Doctor’s words that Ace couldn’t help laughing. “I used to do that back home in Perivale,” she said. “We’d talk about how we’d be a better Prime Minister, and what we’d do if we were. Not like any of us would ever have gone into politics, though.” Not to mention that Perivale was hardly the kind of place that produced future Prime Ministers.

“There, see?” Curt patted the Doctor on the shoulder. “Just forget about that interview, okay? Brian didn’t mean anything by it.”

“He looked like he meant it.”

“Yeah, well…that’s just Brian. He always looks like he means what he’s saying, no matter how much he doesn’t.” A pain rang through Curt’s words so vividly that it made Ace’s heart ache for him.

“Are things not going well between you?” she guessed aloud, without quite meaning to.

“What? Fuck no! Of course not!”

Ace didn’t need Shakespeare to tell her that he was protesting too much, but she kept her mouth shut. If he didn’t want to talk about it, trying to make him open up would only make it worse.

They reached the lift, and Curt pressed the button to call it. “Look, you guys sound like you’re from Xeno 3, so you should go look around, see the city. My home planet may be pretty shitty to live on, but it’s a great place to visit. Go see the monument or something.”

“We’re not from Xeno 3,” the Doctor told him. “I’m from Gallifrey.”

“Is that one of the moons of Callon?” Curt asked.

“Bit further than that.”

Curt shrugged. “Well, wherever it is, that’s all the more reason to go see the sights while you’re here. There’s tourist guide books in the lobby of the hall. Get Shannon to give you some of your pay in advance, and go exploring.”

The lift had arrived by then, and Curt stood there watching as the Doctor and Ace got into the lift, and told it to return to the ground floor. He didn’t budge the whole time the lift doors were closing behind them.

“The nerve of him, telling us to go be tourists!” the Doctor exclaimed as they left the lift again. “I should go right back up there and—”

“ _Doctor_ ,” Ace said, as sharply as she could, in the hopes of successfully interrupting, “if you do that, you’ll lose the job, and we’ll have no access at all. If they’re up to something, it’ll be easier to stop them if you’re part of their crew. Let’s just go out into the city and get the lay of the land. I haven’t been here long enough to see much, after all.”

Somewhat reluctantly, the Doctor agreed, and they headed to the lobby for a guide book.

***

No matter how much she had complained about the idea of acting the tourist, the Doctor had certainly gone about it with great enthusiasm, reading over the whole guide book twice during their walk to the monument, commenting on it the whole way, mostly in the form of expressing keen interest to see whatever sight was listed, even if it was on the other side of the planet or only showed up at certain, far-distant times of the year.

The Doctor only put away the guide book when they reached the monument. To Ace, it didn’t look like much; it was an open-sided pavilion with drearily Victorian design. Beneath the roof of the pavilion was a large bronze statue of a centaur. An actual, right-out-of-Greek-myth centaur: body of a horse, torso of a man where the head should be. “What the…?” was almost all Ace could muster. “ _Why_?” she finally added.

The Doctor walked up to the massive stone tablet that was imbedded in one of the pillars of the pavilion and started reading it aloud. “In fond memory of the Centaurs, the original inhabitants of this world. Let their memory be cherished forevermore.”

Ace scowled. “Meaning the human colonists wiped out the original inhabitants and then felt guilty about it afterwards?”

“So it would appear,” the Doctor agreed, turning to look at the statue. “I doubt they looked like this, though.”

“I certainly hope not.” Ace shook her head. “I can’t believe the Doctor wanted to meet here, of all places. My Doctor, I mean.”

“It’s a landmark. Hard to miss. I didn’t know much about it.” She paused, looking around thoughtfully. “Still don’t, really. Humans celebrating their own blood-stained past always makes me uncomfortable.”

“That makes two of us,” Ace agreed. Statues of Crusaders had always given her the willies, even before she had learned just how horrible the Crusades had really been. “So let’s find someplace else to look around, yeah?”

“There’s a museum about space travel near here,” the Doctor suggested. “Want to have a look?”

Ace shrugged. “Sounds better than this.” So did dental work.

“Let’s go, then,” the Doctor said, heading away from the monument. “Did I ever tell you about the museum that tried to put me and my companions on display?”

“Like, as wax figures?”

“No, us ourselves.”

“That must have slipped his mind…”

The Doctor laughed. “It was a long time ago, when I was still travelling with Ian and Barbara…”


	4. Chapter 4

A hand shaking his shoulder gently ripped Arthur out of his pleasant dreams. He opened his eyes to see Ray leaning over him. “We’ve got to go rehearse,” he said, gesturing to the rest of the Flaming Creatures, who were just visible through the bedroom door. “You should probably go check up on those friends of yours. Don’t want them to worry about you.”

Arthur sat up with a sigh. “I doubt they’d worry about me. They don’t even know me.” And now that he’d made it clear to them that he was gay, they’d probably hate him.

Ray shrugged. “Well, the cleaning bots will be coming through here while we’re rehearsing, so you can’t stay here. If your friends don’t want you around, you can wait for us in the lounge.”

“Can’t I watch you rehearse?”

“Brian doesn’t want anyone rehearsing with an audience.”

“Let’s go, Ray!” Malcolm shouted from the front room.

“Just coming!” Ray leaned down and gave Arthur an almost condescending kiss on the forehead. “You’ll need to be out of here in the next ten minutes.”

With that, he left the room to join his bandmates, and they all left the suite together. An anticlimactic ending to Arthur’s first foray into the world of true adults, but maybe that was how it always went. Especially for a pathetic teenage fan getting a chance at sharing the beds of a rock band.

After getting dressed and only barely getting out of the suite before the cleaning bots arrived, Arthur decided he’d better go to see the Doctor after all: his suitcase was still in her strange vehicle. Of course, if he could keep the job as a low-level flunky in Brian’s entourage, then he wouldn’t really need his suitcase—and definitely not the clothing in it, which would never do to wear around Brian—but it’d be better if he could get it back. He could maybe sell his things and have a little extra pocket money. Dressing to fit in with Curt and Brian was not going to be cheap…

When Arthur arrived back at the Doctor’s suite, he found the door open, and a man in a pastel suit standing by observing as several spidery-legged robots took measurements on the Doctor and Ace, who both stood with their arms fully extended to their sides. The man turned to look at Arthur as he lingered in the doorway. “Ah, there’s the third one!” he exclaimed. “Come in here. I’ll need your measurements, too.”

“What…um…what’s going on…?”

“Brian likes everyone to dress just so,” the man assured him. “Now take off that jacket so we can get the most accurate readings, there’s a good boy. Spread your arms like your friends here.”

After tossing the jacket down onto a nearby table, Arthur spread his arms, and one of the bots came over and started scanning and poking him as it walked tight circles around him. By the time it finally stopped, he was feeling dizzy from trying to watch it.

The man in the pastel suit smiled at the three of them. “We’ll have some clothes ready for you by the end of the day,” he told them, before leaving the suite again.

Once they were alone, Arthur looked at the two women with dread, expecting the lectures to come any moment now, the lectures or the disgust his father had shown. Instead, the Doctor just smiled at him and said “Good morning.”

“Um…good morning…”

“You all right?” Ace asked. “They didn’t ask you to do anything you didn’t want to do, did they?”

Arthur shook his head. How could he explain that he had wanted it much more than they had?

“Really? They didn’t try to make you do drugs with them?”

“Drugs?” Arthur repeated, baffled.

“I knew a girl once who got hooked on heroin because she’d had a one-night stand with a rock singer,” Ace said, shaking her head. “He’d insisted on ‘sharing’ it with her.”

“What’s heroin?”

“Well, it’s a drug. I mean…here, Doctor, help me out with this!”

The Doctor smiled, and shook her head. “Recreational drugs work differently in this time period, Ace. Most of them have been chemically designed to be non-addictive, and have as little possibility of overdose as the chemists can manage.”

“Solve the problem from within, huh? I guess that does make sense.”

Arthur sighed. “I never quite understand what you two are talking about…”

“That happens with the Doctor,” Ace assured him.

“But you don’t make sense, either.”

“Ace _is_ from your very distant past,” the Doctor said. “Originally.”

Arthur slumped into a chair. “I’m too tired to try understanding any of this,” he said, hoping they’d just kick him out and have done with it. He was actually a little hung-over, too, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit it.

Rather than ejecting him, the women started ignoring him, moving to the far side of the room and having a quiet conversation. Though the paranoid part of his brain was convinced they were specifically talking about him, Arthur did his best to ignore them and get a little more sleep. He must have succeeded, because by the time the door buzzer sounded, the Doctor and Ace weren’t even in the room, and he felt much less bleary. Not quite alert enough to get to the door before the Doctor, however, as she came hurrying in from one of the side rooms.

“Your sheet music is ready.” Arthur recognised the voice of Shannon, one of the most important of Brian’s behind-the-scenes support personnel. He didn’t know what her job was, precisely, but she seemed to be lurking in the background of a lot of the candid shots taken of Brian hard at work writing or rehearsing or getting ready to go on stage. “Rehearsal is in one hour, on the main stage. Don’t be late.”

“I won’t,” the Doctor said, before closing the door.

“Do you need quiet to learn the music?” Ace asked, appearing in one of the other doors off the main room.

“It might be helpful,” the Doctor agreed, peering at the music. “A bit complex for a recorder piece…”

Ace laughed. “Serves you right, getting into something like this on the spur of the moment!” She turned to Arthur. “Anywhere you want to go? See the local scenery, get a bite to eat?”

Arthur shook his head. He wasn’t feeling quite recovered enough from his hangover for food. “I’d like to get my bag out of the ship, though.”

“Let’s go, then. The TARDIS seems to still recognise me as a passenger.”

“Of course she does,” the Doctor said. “She knows who my friends are.”

Arthur didn’t much care for the idea that the Doctor’s ship might be alive (and telepathic?), but that was all the more reason to get his things out as soon as possible, before the ship might decide the things belonged to _it_. So, he was glad to accompany Ace out of the hotel attached to the concert venue, and head down the street towards the TARDIS.

The sensation of entering a tiny box and emerging into a cavernous space on the inside was _slightly_ less jarring the second time, but only slightly. “How long does it take to get used to this?” Arthur asked, gesturing at the room as he walked over to his suitcase.

“I’m still not used to it,” Ace sighed. “When I was travelling with the Doctor, it didn’t look anything like this. I much prefer how it looked then.”

“What did it look like?”

“It was all white, gleaming and ordered like a proper spaceship, and the console panel looked more like it had actually been designed for functionality, instead of…like it grew out of spare parts.” Ace shook her head.

“Why would anyone change that for this?” Arthur asked. The controls definitely looked like they had been assembled out of pieces that had been found in a rubbish bin.

“The Doctor says the TARDIS sometimes redesigns itself inside without asking. Time Lord technology is at least quasi-sentient, if not more than that. Evidently.” She shrugged. “It always seemed to be just a machine with _my_ Doctor.”

“You miss him, huh?” Arthur asked, approaching her with his suitcase in hand.

“Yeah, I guess I do.” Ace laughed. “But don’t you dare tell him that if you meet him!”

“What’s he look like?”

“Not much taller than me, old—looks like, I don’t know, oldish—usually wears a beige jacket with question marks on the lapel, a vest covered in question marks, and a straw hat.”

“Uh…”

“Yeah, it looks as awful as it sounds,” Ace assured him, opening the door back out to the street. “No one travels with the Doctor because he’s pretty to look at. They travel with him to see all of time and space, and usually save it in the process.” She paused again, halfway out the door. “Actually, looking at some old pictures of him, they might have once travelled with him because he was pretty to look at. The version who wore the cricketing gear was awfully cute.”

“What’s cricketing gear?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

***

Their new clothes arrived at the suite not long after the Doctor finished her first rehearsal, and Ace was astonished that they had managed to make so many clothes so fast. Even with spiderbots doing the sewing. All three of them were provided with about ten outfits, each made of separate pieces that could be mixed and matched (or more accurately mixed and mismatched) to make a dizzying array of sequined, rhinestoned appearances. Arthur was thrilled by the gear, and the Doctor was beside herself at getting to dress even worse than usual (had the Doctor _ever_ had good fashion sense?), but Ace was a bit appalled by it all, really. It was so ‘70s that it hurt her eyes to look at it. Though that might have been the lights reflecting all those sequins and rhinestones.

They were given strict instructions not to wear their own clothes again while in Brian’s employ—except that Arthur was allowed to keep wearing the shirt and jacket he had borrowed from the Doctor, surprisingly enough—whether they were just lounging about inside the building or out on the street. Seemed a little unfair, considering that Curt had been walking around in utterly normal clothes, but perhaps that was the privilege of stardom. Best not to make waves at this stage of the investigation, so Ace duly changed into one of the spangly shirts, pairing it with the bellbottoms of black silk, since she was not feeling in the mood for a mini-skirt, and she wasn’t presented with any other options.

In the days that followed, the Doctor had to spend most of her time at rehearsals, and Arthur disappeared almost immediately, though Ace occasionally caught sight of him hanging out with one or more of those same four men he had joined at the orgy that first day. After a quick visit back to the tailor to request trading in most of the mini-skirts for some more trousers, or at least slightly longer skirts, Ace reluctantly decided that the only real way to fill her time until the concert was to go exploring the city. Yes, the Doctor wanted her to snoop around the concert hall looking for clues as to what Brian was up to, but Ace really didn’t think he was up to anything. He seemed much too focused on his music to have _time_ to be up to causing trouble.

So she went right back to doing what she would have been doing anyway: acting like a bleeding tourist. But at least she wasn’t having to wear that awful headset to be able to communicate with the locals, or with the other tourists. There seemed to be a lot of them, particularly non-human ones, but Xeno 3 was evidently quite the commercial hub, so many of them were probably there on business. Or to see the concert: a lot of people on the street, human and alien alike, were dressed in the same glam style that Brian was pushing. If he _was_ up to something, it was probably to raise the stock prices of companies that made sequins and rhinestones, Ace decided.

The first day she set out to explore the city with the posh guidebook Shannon had provided (at Brian’s expense, which evidently rankled Shannon, the way she went on about it), Ace had to spend about twenty minutes just figuring out how it worked. It was more of a mini-computer than a book, only it was operated just by touching the screen, and if she happened to brush the screen when she was trying to shield it from the bright sun out on the street, it tended to think she was telling it she wanted to look at something else, and she’d have a terrible time trying to get it back where it had been. Overall, it seemed quite useful, though.

When first opened, the guidebook showed a map of the city with a big friendly icon waving and saying “You are here!” right in the centre. It seemed silly the first time she saw it, but the next time Ace opened the book, she saw that the map had changed: the friendly little waving person was still in the centre, but the map around it had changed to reflect her current location. Imagine a computer that knew where it was! Very science fiction, indeed! Ace wasn’t entirely sure the TARDIS always knew where it was. (Even if it did, she was quite sure the Doctor didn’t always know how to get it to tell _him_ where it was!)

Not only did the guidebook tell her about tourist spots, local eateries and popular shopping venues of all sorts, but it even had information about local culture and history, though the history was the “safe” sort that conveniently overlooked everything unpleasant about history; it repeated the obvious fiction that the “centaurs” had died of natural causes and that the human colonists had tried to save them.

Unfortunately, most of the tourist attractions in the area were similarly “safe,” promoting the myth that the people of Xeno 3 were just the greatest, most wonderful people in the history of humankind, et cetera, et cetera. It was definitely appropriate that the TARDIS was making these people sound American: they certainly _acted_ like Americans.

By the second day, Ace was already tired of the tourist spots, and spent most of her time at little cafés and street markets, just experiencing the crowd. The myriad alien races talking—bantering and bartering—and the thrum of the city were much more interesting than any self-important museum loudly shouting the alleged superiority of Xeno 3 culture. And the wild, inhuman aliens performing renditions of Brian’s music on their own traditional instruments were better—in Ace’s view—than Brian himself.

***

The day of the concert did not come nearly fast enough for Ace’s tastes. She was well tired of hanging about doing nothing long before the day of the event. Once it finally _was_ the day, the morning was spent in frantic last-minute preparations, in which it was all hands on deck, and even she had to actually work, helping oversee the placement of costumes, emergency copies of sheet music (oddly printed on paper despite how far in the future they were), and even refreshments backstage, so the performers for all the different numbers would have no trouble getting on and off stage with everything they needed, and would be fully hydrated when they did so.

In the final minutes leading up to the performance, Ace was finally able to relax, taking up a position in the wings where she could see the stage beautifully. The band Arthur had been hanging out with was the opening act, and after they paraded past her in black, sequined cocktail dresses (all of them low-necked enough to expose their manly, and in some cases hairy, chests), she realised that Arthur had been following them, and he took up a position quite near her to watch his new beau(s?) perform.

The music was staggeringly loud where they were standing, with the beat thrumming through Ace’s bones. She really should have tried to get a seat out front, she realised. The sound wasn’t meant to be heard from beside the stage, and she didn’t have as good a view of the show. Also, she wouldn’t have been in her current jeopardy of being struck by Arthur’s wildly swinging arms. Pretty he might be, but dance he could not.

Thankfully, one of the backstage technicians came over to bring Arthur back into control, so Ace was able to enjoy most of the opening act without worrying about ending up with a concussion. The opening act played three songs, then an MC came out and instructed the audience to give the Flaming Creatures—even their _name_ evoked the glam movement—a big round of applause, which they did as the band left the stage, taking up a position in the wings with Arthur (and Ace, not that any of them noticed her), to watch the rest of the show.

“And now—what you’ve all been waiting for—please welcome the one, the only _Brian Slade_!” the MC shouted, before retreating from the stage.

Brian walked out onto the stage like he was born to it. Or to being a peacock. He was wearing a skin-tight, white holofoil catsuit with an enormous feathered… _thing_ on his shoulders. It reminded Ace of the time the Doctor had taken her to Osaka to see a Takarazuka revue that he claimed was very loosely based on something he had done in 18th century Hokkaido.

Brian raised his arms above his head, revelling in the madness unleashed in the audience at his arrival. The man clearly loved hearing them applauding and screaming his name. While he was posturing for their pleasure, his band filed onto the stage to take their places, all coming—as Brian himself had—from the opposite side of the stage. The band members were wearing pastel colours to make up a rainbow among them. The Doctor, taking her place near Ace’s side of the stage, was in a pink get-up that combined a skirt and half a pair of trousers, with iridescent sequins all over the one-armed blazer she wore above it. To her other side was a tall, dark-skinned man in shimmering orange trousers and a rhinestone-bedecked vest and carrying a keytar. Beyond him was a guitarist in yellow feathers, like a giant canary. More behind and above than beyond him was the drummer, wearing pastel green sequins. Another guitarist wore a sky blue duster in an iridescent fabric, and beyond him was a scaly alien in a pastel purple dress and carrying what looked for all the world like a pair of bongos.

The first number began before the crowd had settled down. Not, actually, that they _ever_ settled down really: they were still shouting and screaming and waving their arms at Brian as if they all wanted to get his attention. Reminded Ace of footage she’d seen of the Beatles in concert. Why pay all that money to see a performer in person if you’re going to make so much noise that you can’t even hear them? Didn’t make much sense to her, but she’d never much been one to follow the herd like that anyway.

Just when the crowd had started to settle down a tiny bit, Curt Wild ran out onto the stage in just a pair of shiny black leather trousers, his hair loose and streaming behind him as he moved. The crowd screamed excitedly, and after Curt plugged his electric guitar into the amp, he jumped in place a bit to get in time with the music before he started to play. And he really was good. Ace didn’t think it likely that he was really the best in the galaxy like Arthur had claimed, but he was certainly very skilful.

Curiously, Ace glanced over at Arthur. He wasn’t sparing an ounce of attention for the Flaming Creatures, but was staring single-mindedly at Curt. Seemed a bit heartless of him, but the other band was quite wrapped up in the performance themselves, so they probably hadn’t noticed that their young friend suddenly had eyes only for someone else.

Delighted shrieks from the audience got Ace’s attention back on the stage. Curt was performing a guitar solo, or was Brian performing it? Brian was on his knees in front of Curt, with his face right up in Curt’s guitar. He might have been playing it with his teeth as if he thought he was Jimi Hendrix, or he might have been pretending to be having oral sex with Curt through the instrument. Ace didn’t even want to know which. But whatever he was doing, the audience was enjoying it no end. Eventually the stunt, whatever it was supposed to be, ended, and Brian returned to his place at the microphone to finish the song.

For the second song, Curt set his guitar aside, and joined Brian on vocals, with the two of them singing a tender love duet. Or Brian’s side sounded tender, anyway. Curt’s was actually rather unintelligible. There were moments here and there that made Ace sure that he did have a nice singing voice, but he was absolutely not using it properly. Seemed very emotionally caught up in the song, though.

On the third song, the Doctor and the other “exotic” instruments were up, each getting significant solo passages in the midst of the slow, intense piece. Ace didn’t quite understand what the lyrics meant—they felt like they’d been badly translated, really—but it seemed very emotional and tragic, whatever it was. The minor key might have had something to do with that impression, of course.

In the midst of the keytar solo, the Doctor’s attention seemed to be caught by something off-stage, and as the keytarist stopped and Brian stepped back up to his microphone, she suddenly shouted “Look out!” Before anyone could react, the Doctor ran over to Brian and shoved him out of the way moments before a beam of light came shooting in their direction from above the audience. The doctor aimed her sonic out at the shooter even as Ace ran out onto the stage to help. Ace looked out at the shooter—standing on a catwalk above the right side of the audience—just in time to see his weapon explode in his hands.

The curtain was already falling by the time the man turned and started to run back along the catwalk.

“Are you all right?” the Doctor asked, offering Brian a hand to get up with.

Brian shoved her hand away, and got back to his feet unaided. “What is _wrong_ with you?!” he shouted at her.

“Wrong with _me_?!” the Doctor shouted right back. “Is that how you thank someone for saving your life?”

“Idiot woman,” Brian growled, before shoving his way past everyone and storming offstage.

“Fuck.” The word escaped Curt’s lips more like breath than speech. “You just…” He clenched his fists, and shook his head before looking at the Doctor. “You didn’t have any way of knowing,” he sighed, before following Brian.

“Just what is going on around here?” the Doctor exclaimed. “Are they saying that was part of the act?”

“It does sound that way,” Ace said. “But…I haven’t read anything about something like that taking place during his previous shows.”

“There _hasn’t_ been anything like that,” Arthur assured her. “I’ve seen the vids of every single one of Brian’s concerts, and that’s _never_ happened.”

“He’s probably just displacing his anger,” one of the Flaming Creatures said, adjusting his sequined top hat. “He’ll calm down after a little while.”

The Doctor shook her head. “I’m not waiting for that. I want answers _now_.”

She took off after Brian without waiting to see if anyone was going to follow her. She probably already knew that Ace would. Surprisingly, Arthur was the only other one who came with them. Did everyone else on the stage _really_ believe that Brian was just venting at the wrong person?

Brian had a dressing room not far off stage, and it was there that they found him. Curt was helping him out of his feathered headdress. “You should look at it as a bullet dodged,” Curt was saying.

“No, it was a laser blast you were _saved_ from,” the Doctor corrected him. “So why are you upset about it? Or do you _want_ to be dead?”

“It was on stun,” Brian said with an icy rage.

“That was really just a…a part of the show?” Arthur asked, sounding like his heart was being crushed.

“I’ve been telling him it was a bad idea all along,” Curt said, smiling weakly at Arthur.

“Just what, exactly, were you trying to do?” the Doctor asked. “Trying to retire by faking your own death?”

Brian sighed dismally, and sat down in front of his make-up table, with his back to the mirror. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

When Brian didn’t seem inclined to answer, Curt sighed. “It’s what you were asking about earlier,” he said. “That was his big plan to take over. Sort of.”

“How would faking his death let him take over anything?” Ace asked. “Or was the shot only supposed to injure you?”

Brian shook his head. “It worked for Jaysie,” he said.

“Who?”

“An old Earth warlord,” Brian said. “He faked his own death, then pretended to rise from the grave, allowing him to take over the whole world for some two thousand years.”

“Huh?” Ace shook her head. “I…look, I’m _from_ Earth, and there’s no one who ever did that. Who could even live that long, anyway? What was he, a vampire?”

Brian shrugged. “He was some kind of superstar, that’s all I know. And he took over the world.”

Ace frowned. A superstar…? Jaysie…? Wait…no. “Um…do you mean…are you talking about Jesus? Like the musical, _Jesus Christ Superstar_?”

“J. C. into Jaysie…that’s probably what he means,” the Doctor agreed.

Ace grimaced, and shook her head. “There’s so much wrong with that that I don’t even know where to start.”

“So, it’s not true?” Curt asked.

“Not even close,” Ace assured him. “I don’t know what really happened as far as dying and being resurrected, but he was no warlord. And it wasn’t that he ruled the world, but that he inspired a religion that dominated _part_ of the world for…well, it was still dominant when I left.”

“Two thousand years is more or less right,” the Doctor told her. “Rounded to the nearest millennium.”

“Regardless of the legend’s truth, this would have worked,” Brian said, glaring at her. “If you hadn’t interfered.”

“How would rising from the dead have let you take over anything?” Arthur asked, his voice shaking slightly.

Brian spread his hands. “I was going to revive at the funeral and announce that I’d been restored to fulfil my grand purpose of leading the galaxy along a better path. And then they’d have elected me to the Premiership, and we could have finally solved all the problems with this rotting society.”

The Doctor sighed, and shook her head. “That would never have worked. Now I’m sorry I wasted my time getting involved. This didn’t need me to clean it up.”

“No, I’m glad you did,” Arthur said. “No matter what would have happened, everyone in the audience would have been crushed if they thought they’d seen their idol slaughtered right in front of their eyes.”

The Doctor smiled at him. “Yes, that’s true.” She turned back to Brian. “You should think more about your fans’ feelings.”

“I’ve been telling him that this whole time, and he hasn’t listened once,” Curt said, shaking his head.

“If you don’t appreciate me, you don’t have to stay,” Brian said, his eyes narrowing to slits.

“Don’t be like that, baby.”

An uncomfortable silence followed Curt’s reply, in which Ace felt that they were definitely intruding on what promised at any second to become either a lover’s quarrel or a pair of lovers making up from a quarrel. Either way, she wanted to leave, and to make sure that the Doctor left, too. Arthur no longer seemed even slightly their responsibility, so Ace didn’t think she cared anymore _what_ he did.

The silence was only broken when Shannon, the woman from the audition, came running into the room. “Brian, we have a problem,” she reported, pushing her way past the three bodies in her way.

“What is it?”

“Because of the interference, the bot manning the escape tunnel didn’t open the door. Harold’s been caught.”

Brian scowled, and didn’t answer.

“Harold?” Ace repeated. “Is that your fake assassin?”

Curt nodded. “He’s an out-of-work actor who came around hoping for a job. And he got one, just not the kind he expected.” He shook his head. “Brian, you know that fucker’s not gonna keep his mouth shut. Don’t you think you’d better admit what was going on before the cops make his statement public?”

“That will make me hated,” Brian said. “Worst possible thing we could do. Shannon, put a word in with your contacts among the politicians. Make sure they don’t take him seriously.”

“Don’t you dare,” the Doctor said, grabbing Shannon by the shoulder. “You can’t ruin an innocent man’s life like that.”

“You would have _him_ ruin _mine_?” Brian countered. “When I’m much more important than he is?”

“There’s an old Earth saying that seems apt here,” Ace said. “You made the bed, you lie in it.”

Brian chortled, and turned in place on his stool, so that he was facing the mirror. “Shannon, get rid of them,” he said, before casually beginning to take off his make-up. “I’m done discussing this.”

“You heard him,” Shannon said, trying unsuccessfully to prise the Doctor’s hand off her shoulder. “You have to leave.”

“At least out into the hall,” Curt added quietly.

To that the Doctor nodded, and all five of them left the dressing room, letting Brian alone with his failure. “I’m not going to let you turn the authorities against that man they have in custody.”

“It’s your own fault he was captured,” Shannon replied coldly. “If you hadn’t interfered with the act—”

“How was I supposed to know it was an act!? No one said anything to us about it!”

“That was the whole reason he wanted to bring on new performers at such ridiculously short notice,” Curt said. “Increase the number of people who didn’t know about it. So there’d be people onstage who were as surprised as the audience.”

“Did the Creatures know about this, too?” Arthur asked, his voice and eyes watery.

“No, only me, Trevor, Reg and Harley knew. And Shannon, of course,” Curt added, with an annoyed look in his eyes as they turned to the young woman still being held in place by the Doctor. “So, are you, uh, _with_ the Creatures?” Curt asked, looking back at Arthur.

Arthur flushed bright crimson, and shook his head weakly. “Not…exactly…” Arthur’s response made Curt grin delightedly.

“Flirt later,” Ace sighed, stepping between them. “We need to do something to extract that man from custody before he can be punished for attempting to fake a crime.”

“You’d be destroying Brian’s career,” Shannon said, “and breaking the hearts of all his fans. Is that why you’re here, to hurt billions of people?”

The Doctor’s face was momentarily stunned, and her grip on Shannon’s shoulder relaxed, allowing the young woman to shake her off. “That’s not…I would never.”

“That’s all you would accomplish by letting the public learn the truth.”

Curt sighed. “She might have a point about that. That guy’s gonna be in trouble no matter what we do. You’re not from here, so you don’t know what the law’s like around here. If Brian fesses up, Harold’s just gonna rot in jail for, well, the technical terms are weird, but on other planets it’d probably be called attempting to incite a riot.”

“That’s a crime here?” Ace asked.

“It can be anywhere,” the Doctor said. “But a disturbance of the peace is a very minor offense, not like attempted murder.”

“Not on Xeno 3. Our leader’s fucking nuts,” Curt told her. “Regular dictator. Fuck, I spent two years in jail on the same charges, just ‘cause I dropped my pants on stage.” He shook his head. “If Brian hadn’t used his influence to get me out, I’d still be there.”

“How is indecent exposure causing a riot?” Ace asked.

“The audience didn’t wanna see my cock, I guess.” Curt shrugged. “I was pretty high. I don’t really remember what happened.” So much for the Doctor’s claim that drugs worked differently in this era!

The Doctor scowled. “If Brian has that kind of influence, will he be able to have this Harold released, too?”

Curt shrugged. “Maybe, but probably not. The plan was that if Harold got caught, we’d just free him after Brian became Premiere.”

“This has to be the sloppiest domination plan I’ve ever heard,” Ace said, shaking her head.

The Doctor nodded. “For the moment, maybe we should just let things go on as they are. We’ll rescue Harold with the TARDIS if we have to, since it’s my fault he’s been captured in the first place.”

“And Brian?” Curt asked, his face a mask of worry.

“I’d rather he found the courage to admit the truth, but I suppose I don’t have much right to make him,” the Doctor admitted. “So long as no one dies, I’ll let the rest of it slide.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup, three for one special on that concert. ;) (Four, if you count the Flaming Creatures' costumes...)


	5. Chapter 5

Arthur followed the Doctor and Ace away from Brian’s dressing room, leaving Curt and Shannon to tend to Brian’s foul mood. As much as Arthur would have preferred that Curt take him far away from all this, he knew that could never happen; Curt would always be with Brian. When they returned to the backstage area, they found the Creatures all gathered around a small video screen, watching the news feed about the arrest of the “assassin.” They were so caught up in what they thought had almost happened that Arthur couldn’t stand the idea of staying with them, so he ended up following the two women back up to their suite.

“Are you back on our team?” Ace asked, as Arthur entered the suite.

“There are teams?”

“Of course not,” the Doctor said, smiling. “You want to help us keep anything worse from happening to that Harold person?”

Arthur nodded. “And, if we can, to protect the fans, too. They don’t want to know what Brian tried to do to them.”

The Doctor nodded.

“So, what’s the plan, Doctor?” Ace took a seat on the couch, looking resigned. “I’m assuming you don’t want to go charging in to rescue him unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Exactly. Best to work the system to release him so he can resume his life.” She turned on the video screen in the wall. “For now, I think all we can do is see how the incident is being treated by the local authorities.”

The image on the screen resolved into one showing a reporter standing in front of the concert hall. “And we have yet to hear any official comment from Brian Slade or his staff,” the man was saying, “but we expect to hear from them shortly.” He pressed a hand to his ear. “Breaking news!” he announced excitedly. “The ambassador from Xeno 10 is about to hold a press conference, and it is expected he will be addressing the subject of the attempted assassination of his planet’s biggest star. Our cameras are taking you there, live.”

The image changed to show the interior of the press room at the embassy. It was a depressingly boring room, unbroken beige walls, distinguished only by the governmental emblem of Xeno 10. The ambassador was a heavy-set man about the same age as Arthur’s father, and even looked rather like him, every bit as grim, too. Though the camera was floating high enough that the image didn’t show any of the others in the press corps, Arthur could hear them murmuring until the ambassador cleared his throat, bringing them under instant control.

“The past hour has witnessed the near success of a most violent and unprecedented crime,” the ambassador said, already causing a new furore to arise.

“Unprecedented?” Ace repeated. “He wouldn’t be the first rock star to be murdered, even if it _had_ been real. What about John Lennon?”

“I don’t think anyone in this time period still remembers the Beatles,” the Doctor said. _Arthur_ certainly didn’t know who or what that was… “Though some of their songs live on.”

“This was not to be a simple act of murder!” the ambassador shouted, pounding his hand on the podium in front of him, quieting the room again. “This was the prelude to war!”

The silence from the press corps took on a very different tone, as if they were all holding their breath in horrified awe. The Doctor looked both outraged and confused, and Ace quietly breathed the name Gordon Bennett, whoever _that_ was.

“How so?” one of the reporters finally mustered the temerity to ask.

“Brian Slade is not only one of the most important performers on Xeno 10, but he is a personal relative of our royal family,” the ambassador answered. Arthur had never heard _that_ before! And he thought he’d read every account of Brian’s life that was out there. “We have learned that the would-be assassin is in the employ of warmongers who intended to assassinate our entire royal family at the funeral, plunging the solar system into the chaos of war as the other planets scramble to take over our own. We urge the government of Xeno 3 to hand over the assassin to us, so that we may determine from him the identity of the conspirators who are determined to destroy our way of life.”

As the image went back to the now stunned-looking reporter in front of the concert hall, the Doctor turned off the sound on the video. “Was any of that true?” she asked, looking at Arthur. “Is he related to your king?”

“I don’t think so,” Arthur said. “All the accounts of his childhood said he’s from a middle-class family. And he wasn’t even born in the capital.” He frowned. “Even if it _was_ true, the whole royal family would never have attended the funeral. Even if there had been a funeral, I mean. The king has been very outspoken in his hatred for Brian, especially since he started having his affair with Curt.”

The Doctor sat down on a nearby chair, frowning. “That’s right, there’s a retrogressive homophobic trend on Xeno 10 right now, isn’t there?”

Arthur nodded, though he hadn’t really been aware of it being “retrogressive.” Did that mean that at some point in the past, the people of Xeno 10 had actually accepted people like him instead of treating them like diseased monsters?

“That has to be tough on you,” Ace commented.

“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, though it was certainly an understatement!

“So what was all that about then?” Ace asked, gesturing towards the video, which had since gone to commercial. “Is Xeno 10 trying to make this an international—er, interplanetary—incident so they can, well, get something out of it?”

“Seems that way. Hard to say precisely what, though.” The Doctor frowned. “If we’re lucky, they’re just looking for economic sanctions to better their trade relations with one or more of the other planets.”

They discussed the situation in circles several times over, always returning to the conclusion that they just didn’t have enough information to figure out what was going on. They probably would have gone through those logical circuits several more times if Arthur hadn’t spotted the vid screen starting to show another press conference, this time with the President of Xeno 3 himself. The Doctor hastily turned the sound back on.

“The Department of Public Corrections has finished its primary interrogation of the suspect being held for the attempted murder of the foreign performer Brian Slade,” President Reynolds announced, “and the results are shocking.” He frowned, shaking his head. “From the time of his capture, the criminal insisted that he was in the employ of Slade himself, and that the weapon had been set to stun. Forensic analysis of the weapon came back and proved that he was quite correct; it was incapable of delivering a lethal charge.”

“But you destroyed his weapon,” Ace said, looking at the Doctor, who only nodded grimly.

“Our truth probes have gotten the full, sordid story out of the would-be assassin,” Reynolds continued, “and learned that his initial story was only half-true. His weapon was not designed to kill, but he was not working for Slade. He was working for the Royal Government of Xeno 10, and he is neither the assassin he seems to be nor the unemployed actor his passport claims him to be. No, my friends, I tell you he is a warmonger! He is a villain who makes his filthy living starting wars! He has come here to our beautiful and peaceful planet to frame us for the murder of a foreign citizen—he has come here to give Xeno 10 an excuse to declare war on us!”

The press corps exploded into a chaos of questions, and Arthur looked over at the Doctor. “There aren’t people like that, are there?”

“Who start wars as a profession? Probably, but I've never met any, though I’ve met some who dabble in it as a hobby.”

“Pretty disgusting hobby,” Ace muttered.

The Doctor shrugged. “Compared to some of his other hobbies, it’s…well, it’s still quite disgusting. All the Master’s hobbies are unspeakably brutal.”

“The question is, are they really going to use this as an excuse to start a war?” Ace asked, only partially drowning out Reynolds moving on to accuse Brian and his entire entourage of being in on the plot to foment a war.

“It sounds like both sides want to,” the Doctor sighed. “We’d better have a word with them.” She got to her feet and turned off the vid screen. “Let’s see if we can get Brian to come with us. It might have a little more weight if the purported victim is also coming forward to condemn the idea of going to war.” She stopped, and glanced down at her clothes. “First, I’m changing into something a little less...”

“Pink?” Ace suggested with a laugh.

“That, too.” The Doctor disappeared into one of the bedrooms, and returned a couple minutes later wearing simple trousers and a silk blouse not too different from the one Arthur had borrowed from her. “This should be a little less awkward to get around in.”

They all left the suite together and hurried back to Brian’s dressing room. They found it empty, unfortunately, and on asking around, they learned from Shannon that he and Curt had headed up to their bedroom, with instructions that they were not to be disturbed.

“Should we go without him, or wait until the morning?” Ace asked.

The Doctor hesitated, looking like she was deep in thought. “I suppose they couldn’t really declare war until a few days have passed. Neither of them is Louis Napoleon, after all.” She nodded. “We’ll wait until morning. It’ll give us some time to plan.”

“So, back to the suite, or do we want to go back to the TARDIS?” Ace asked.

The Doctor shook her head. “We can’t be sure there isn’t outside interference,” she said. “If we go to the TARDIS, we’ll alert any _real_ warmongers to our presence.”

Arthur bit his lip a moment. “If we’re not doing anything about it right now, I’ll just meet you in the morning,” he said. “Back here, or in the lounge?”

“At the breakfast buffet,” the Doctor said. “So we can get going as soon as possible.”

Arthur nodded, and headed back towards where he had last seen Ray and the rest of the Flaming Creatures. Maybe they’d seen something else on the vid feed that would be useful. And even if not, Arthur could use some physical comforting right now. The skies seemed to be closing in on him and crushing him.

***

As they started walking back towards the suite, Ace looked at the Doctor curiously. “You’re not going to say you know another rogue Time Lord called the Warmonger, are you?”

The Doctor laughed. “No, no. Though the first time I ran into the Master off of Gallifrey, he was calling himself the War Chief.” She shook her head. “I don’t think this is his doing, though. It’s too sloppy, and depends on far too many factors outside his control. There are other renegade Time Lords who have tried to start wars, though, and still others who have made a living profiting off them.”

“Are there really that many renegade Time Lords?” Ace had gotten the idea that the Master was the only one. Unless the Doctor counted as a rogue Time Lord, anyway.

The Doctor sighed. “There shouldn’t be _any_ right now, other than the Master. And she’s probably still having trouble getting away from that black hole.”

“She?”

“Don’t tell my past self about that, either,” the Doctor said. “It actually took my previous regeneration a little while to recognise the Master in his female body.”

“Is that just normal for Time Lords?” Ace asked. “Changing sex like that?”

The Doctor shrugged. “It’s both much more complicated and much more simple than you’re thinking. After our first regeneration, Time Lords don’t really pay much attention to sex and gender.”

“Only after the first?”

The Doctor winced. “Sadly, yes. Had a very rude reminder of that just before I regenerated. Probably why it went this way.” She shrugged. “It only changes how humans of certain time periods react to me, really.”

“Certain time periods meaning most of them, I assume,” Ace sighed.

“Nearly, yes.” The Doctor sighed. “Not just humans, now that I think of it. A lot of species have trouble moving past such discrimination, once they add it to their society.”

“At least this time period doesn’t seem to have too much of that. Just gay-bashing.”

“And some racism against non-humans. Probably better not to let on to them that I’m not human,” the Doctor said, with a laugh.

Ace nodded. “Do we have a plan for tomorrow?” she asked, as they got back to the suite. “Who do we try to talk to, the local government, or the one on Xeno 10?”

The Doctor frowned. “We might need to talk to both of them. Though I don’t know if the local government will want to talk to us, if they think we’re from Xeno 10 ourselves.”

“Would it help if I faked an American accent?”

“I doubt it.” The Doctor shook her head. “We’ll start with the embassy, and if that doesn’t settle the problem, then we’ll talk to the Xeno 3 government.”

***

Everyone at the breakfast buffet—other than Ace and the Doctor—actually applauded when Brian entered the room. Just like on stage the previous night, the man was revelling in the attention. No wonder he’d become a pop star: with that much need for constant adulation, he would have been miserable in any other career. Once he and Curt had sat down with their food, the Doctor headed over to their table, sitting down without asking permission. Ace hesitated to sit until it became clear that Brian wasn’t going to send them away.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me I need to go make some kind of public apology,” Brian said, his voice flat.

“Not exactly.” The Doctor smiled and shook her head. “Adding to the public chaos right now will only exacerbate the situation. I want to talk to the ambassador from Xeno 10, try to prevent a war from breaking out over this. And I think he’ll be more keen to listen to me if you come along.”

Brian silently took a bite of his breakfast—looked like scrambled eggs, only deep blue in colour—and didn’t actually meet the Doctor’s eyes until he had fully chewed and swallowed the mouthful. “I suppose I should,” he agreed. “War will certainly impede sales of my music.”

“And kill your fans.”

“That, too.” It sounded to Ace like the fans were not merely an afterthought to Brian, but a relatively inconsequential one.

“I don’t know how much good that’ll do,” Curt commented. “It’s Reynolds who’s screaming for war.”

“The ambassador’s broadcast this morning was also quite vehement that Xeno 10 would not stand for Reynolds’ false accusations,” the Doctor said. “And he claimed that they had gotten new information that the conspiracy to murder the royal family had its mastermind in Reynolds’ government. They’re both gearing up for war with alarming speed. The question is just which one is Napoleon III and which one is Bismarck.”

“Are those people?” Curt asked.

“They are, but I’m not quite sure what the Doctor’s talking about,” Ace said.

The Doctor sighed. “I’m disappointed in your history professors, Ace.”

“You know I didn’t really pay much attention in school. Not enough explosions.”

Curt laughed. “Sounds like the problem I had with school, too!”

While Curt was still laughing, Arthur hurried over and joined them at the table. “Did you see the news this morning?” he asked. “Things are getting ugly. People could really get hurt.”

“We’re working on it, Arthur,” the Doctor assured him. “Brian’s already agreed to accompany us to the embassy.”

Curt shook his head. “Just talking to the ambassador won’t do shit if Reynolds decides to launch his war fleet while you’re jabbering away. I’ll go to the presidential residence, see if I can get an audience with one of the bigwigs there.”

“I’ll go with you!” Arthur volunteered with an eagerness that made Ace want to laugh. His innocence was adorable, but could end up getting him hurt if he wasn’t careful…

Curt’s grin only encouraged Ace to worry further. He looked like he had every intention of taking advantage of the boy as soon as they were alone together… “Maybe I should go, too,” she suggested. “You don’t need my help, surely, Doctor.”

“Reynolds hates foreigners,” Curt said. “I can get away with one, but there’s no way his people would let me in with two. Not right now.”

Ace looked over at the Doctor with concern, but she nodded, looking like she fully agreed with Curt. Probably had no idea why Curt really wanted to be alone with Arthur, either, but what could Ace say when Curt’s boyfriend was sitting right there next to him?

***

The official residence where Xeno 3’s President Reynolds lived looked more like a bank than a palace to Arthur. It was a tall, heavy edifice in chrome and glass, with a portico containing the emblem of Xeno 3’s government. Soldiers in full dress uniform lined the walk approaching the front door. Most of them glared as Curt and Arthur walked past them, but one about three-quarters of the way down flagged them over and asked Curt for an autograph. That broke the tension enough that Arthur was feeling quite relaxed as they actually reached the front door.

A robotic doorman stopped them. “Do you have an appointment?” it asked.

“No, I don’t,” Curt answered. “I’m Curt Wild, and I need to talk to someone in power about what happened yesterday.”

The robot was silent for about thirty seconds. “You will please come wait inside,” it said, then opened the door.

Another robot was waiting for them inside, this one much more human-looking, with a flat screen for a head, displaying a quasi-realistic digital face. The face on the screen smiled. “Welcome, Mr. Wild. You and your guest will accompany me to a waiting room.”

“Uh-huh.” Curt seemed to be acting like this was business as usual, so Arthur followed him without worrying.

At least, he wasn’t worried until they got to the room. It was a small white room with a bench-like bunk built into one wall—or was it a bed-like bench?—and neither windows nor video screens. Curt just walked over and sat down on the bench/bunk, but Arthur turned to look at the robot, who was still standing just on the other side of the doorway. “How long are we going to be waiting here?” he asked.

“Someone should be with you in five or six hours,” the robot replied, just as the door slid shut.

“Five or six hours?” Arthur repeated.

“They must think this is a pretty important visit,” Curt commented. “Brian had to wait two days in one of these rooms before anyone was willing to talk to him about letting me out of jail.”

“Don’t they care about their people at all?” Arthur asked, as he sat down beside Curt.

“Not really. They get pissed if we don’t pay our taxes, but other than that, they don’t give a shit.” Curt leaned forward. “You’re not saying you mind spending a few hours alone with me, are you?”

Arthur shook his head feverishly. “Of course not!” This just wasn’t the place he’d have preferred they spend that time alone together.

Curt smiled, and leaned back again. “So tell me about yourself,” he said. “What’s your favourite colour? Song? Movie?”

Bewildered by all the questions, and overcome by getting so much attention from Curt Wild himself, Arthur couldn’t really manage to produce any words to answer any of the questions. He tried looking down at his hands as they nervously twiddled about in his lap, hoping that maybe he could compose himself a bit and produce an answer. Curt didn’t wait. He extended one hand the short distance between them and took hold of Arthur’s chin, lifting it so Arthur was looking right in his eyes. One callused thumb gently brushed across Arthur’s lips before the hand was retracted from Arthur’s chin, and moved to the back of his neck instead.

Arthur kept his eyes open as long as possible as Curt pulled his face in towards him. Only at the first contact between their lips did he finally shut his eyes, blissfully revelling in the feeling of Curt’s lips and tongue.

After the second or third kiss, though, Arthur came back to himself, and gently pulled back. “Wait, what about Brian?” he asked.

“Brian doesn’t care,” Curt insisted.

“How could he not care?”

Curt sighed. “Look, kid, Brian fucks other people all the time. He’s probably putting the moves on those two chicks you arrived with right now.”

“I don’t think that’d be a good idea at all,” Arthur said, then explained about what the Doctor had said to him before they arrived on Xeno 3, about having been a man with a granddaughter in the past.

“Shit, that’s some good plastic surgery!” Curt exclaimed. “I wouldn’t have thought she was old enough to have even a grown kid, much less grandkids.” He shrugged. “Brian doesn’t care how old someone is, as long as they’re still hot, anyway.”

“Only I thought maybe she doesn’t like men,” Arthur explained. “If she had kids while she was a man, then she must like women, right?”

“Or she could like both, like Brian does. Even if she doesn’t, Brian likes a challenge. Especially one with blonde hair.” He scowled. “Feels like he goes after every blonde he sees.”

“Um…” Arthur wasn’t sure what to say about that. After all, Curt was a blond himself…

“Every time I go in for a trim, he tries to get me to bleach my hair even lighter,” Curt went on. “He’s gonna have me ending up with fucking white hair if he’s not careful.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, Brian isn’t here, and he won’t care, so.” Curt stopped with an unnatural abruptness. “Unless you don’t want me to fuck you?”

Arthur shook his head. “No, of course I want that! I want it more than anything!”

Curt smiled. “That’s all that matters, then.”

He leaned in and kissed Arthur again, and Arthur put everything he was into reciprocating the warmth and passion in Curt’s lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, how I've been awaiting getting to this point in the story! :D My OTP at last arrives!
> 
> BTW, you have no idea how hard it was for me to write that conversation about people who start wars for a living without inserting a quote from "The Princess Bride."
> 
> And I should probably admit that the Master actually *being* the War Chief is just my headcanon...but really, how could I ever think otherwise?


	6. Chapter 6

If Ace hadn’t known better, she would have thought they building they were approaching was a British Embassy, not the embassy of an Earth colony so far in the future that they didn’t remember what England even was. It was a stuffy-looking building in a style that Ace immediately wanted to call “Cyberpunk Greek Revival.” The guards on the gate outside even wore red jackets and black hats. They weren’t the same black hats on a guardsman in her day—more like berets, really—but the psychological impact on her was just the same: it made her want to toss insults at them until it looked like they might break their stone-faced silence, and then run away as fast as she could. It was probably, therefore, best that she was not alone right now.

Brian stopped across the street from the embassy, scowling at it. “Could they be any more old-fashioned?” he sighed.

“You wouldn’t want them wasting time rebuilding every time the style changed, would you?” Ace pointed out.

“It was already out of touch by the time this place was built.” Brian scowled, and shook his head. “Matches the attitude of the men who run it.”

“Well, we’ll just have to convince them to modernise, then, won’t we?” the Doctor replied cheerfully. “Let’s go.” She led the way across the street and up to the guards on the gate, heedless of whether or not the others were following her. As soon as the guards turned their faces in her direction, the Doctor walked up unsettlingly close to them. “I’d like to speak to the ambassador,” she told them. “I’m here with Brian Slade, and he’s got some things to say about the ambassador’s announcement this morning.”

The guards turned their heads towards Brian almost mechanically, then one lifted his hand to his face, and spoke into his wrist, muttering so quietly that Ace couldn’t make out any of the words. Then he lowered his hand and returned to stony silence for just long enough that the Doctor started making another attempt. Midway through her sentence, the guard opened the gate to let them in.

“About time! Come on, let’s go!”

“Is she always like that?” Brian asked Ace, as they followed the Doctor into the gated embassy grounds.

“More or less.” Ace shrugged. “Mind you, she was a different person when I knew her best.” Quite literally a different person, in fact.

They walked on in silence until they entered the embassy building itself. Just inside the door, they were met by a stuffy gent who was wearing an actual _monocle_ as if he had just stepped out of the 19th century. As he adjusted his monocle, Ace caught just a hint of coloured light from it, and suddenly realised that there was a display on the other side, feeding him information. “Slade and party,” the man said, his voice dignified yet disgusted. “You will follow me, if you please.” He began to lead the way down a hallway that led into the back of the building. “What, precisely, did you have to say to the ambassador?” he asked, casting a brief glance at Brian. “It will facilitate the encounter if he is adequately prepared.”

“I wanted to tell him flatly and to his face that I will not be used to push his military agenda,” Brian said, inspecting his fingernails as he spoke, as if he had just come from a nail salon.

The stuffy man sighed. “Yes, that’s what he thought you’d want to say.” After a few minutes of walking further in silence, he stopped beside a door, which slid open at a touch of a button. “You will be so good as to wait in here.”

The Doctor and Brian both went inside the little waiting room and took a seat without a word, but Ace stopped just inside the door and looked at the man who had brought them there. “How long are we going to be waiting?” she asked.

“The ambassador may have some time for you this afternoon,” the man replied.

“What?! But it’s first thing in the morning!” The door slid shut. “Hey! Wait, I’m not done talking to you!” Ace tried to find the controls to open the door again, but there weren’t any. “You lousy—”

“There’s no point in yelling about it,” Brian said. “They live to make people sit and wait. It’s the only show of power they can experience on a regular basis. And the more fuss one kicks up, the longer they’ll make one wait.”

Clenching both her fists, Ace turned to look at him. “You could have said something about that _before_ we were trapped in here.”

“There’s really nothing to be done. Unless you would have expected me to wait in here by myself.”

“Once he’s been away for a few minutes, I can use my sonic to open the door,” the Doctor said.

“Escaping will only make the situation worse,” Brian insisted. “Just sit down and relax.”

“How can you be so calm?” Ace asked, even as she walked over to sit down near the Doctor. “They’re trying to use _your_ stupid stunt to start a war.”

“And they can’t do so in a single day. There’s far too much bureaucracy for them to wade through.”

“War has a bad habit of cutting through the red tape,” the Doctor sighed. “This is all bringing back a lot of memories,” she added, looking around at the featureless, white-walled room.

“You’ve had to stop two mad governments from taking advantage of a singer’s stupidity before?” Ace asked.

The Doctor laughed. “No, but one time Jo and I had to stop Earth from going to war with the Draconians over some border attacks. We kept getting locked up, particularly by the humans. They thought we were spies, you see.”

“Hmm. How did you stop the war?”

“Proved to them that it was a third party attacking them, of course. It helped that I had good personal history with the Draconians, of course.”

Ace sighed. “I don’t think that’ll help us much, then. Unless you think that third party is involved here, somehow.”

“No, too sloppy for the Master, and too subtle for the Daleks. I don’t think there’s a third party here.” The Doctor shook her head. “From what I was able to look up last night, I think these two planets have been itching to start a fight for years, and this just provided them a convenient excuse.”

“What about that galactic government?” Ace asked. “Can’t it do anything to stop them going to war?”

“That’s precisely why I want to obtain the Premiership,” Brian said, getting up and moving to sit on the same side of the room as the two of them, placing himself in the empty chair between them. “The Premiere _could_ intervene to prevent the war, but he won’t. They’re all completely corrupt. All they care about is money and power. Not only do they not care what happens to the people, they’re eager to stir up any malign undercurrents if it will help them be re-elected.”

“Sounds like business as usual to a politician,” Ace sighed. “They’re especially bad about that in America; their current President’s policies have so many racist undertones that me and some of my mates even did a paper about it for class once.” Not that it had gone over well, especially since they practically all turned in the _same_ paper. She shook her head. “But it’s not like _you_ care what happens to the people, either. Not if you were willing to cause so much emotional harm to your fans.” Ace could remember how much grief John Lennon’s death had caused among his fans; she could only imagine how much worse it would have been if it had been right in front of their eyes and while he was at the height of his popularity.

“It was only going to be for a few days,” Brian assured her, gently patting her knee and then leaving his hand there. “The funeral would have been held quite promptly, and I would have risen up out of the coffin, alive and well, so—”

“Yeah, that’s great,” Ace said, shoving his hand off her leg. “But keep your hands to yourself. I’m not one of your floozies.”

“Floozies?” Brian repeated. “What planet do those come from?”

The Doctor laughed at that, enough that it made Ace start feeling uncomfortably self-conscious. She got to her feet again and paced over to the door. “How much longer are we going to have to stay here?”

“It’s probably been long enough,” the Doctor said, following her over. “Here, let me get the door open.” She aimed her sonic device at the door, lit it up, and then looked at it closely after the light went off again.

“There doesn’t seem to be any kind of read-out,” Ace said. “What are you looking at?”

“There is one, but it’s very subtle,” the Doctor assured her. “I just had to find out what kind of lock we’re dealing with.”

“What kind is it?”

“Very complicated. Actually unlocking it directly with the sonic would take hours. I should be able to interface with the computer to use it to unlock the door, though. It’s like Wi-Fi,” she added, smiling at Ace.

“What’s Wi-Fi?”

“Oh, yes, after your time.” The Doctor sighed, before lighting up the end of her sonic again. “Sometimes, I think maybe I’ve had a negative impact on Earth’s developmental history. So many of the non-military uses they put their technology to from the 1990s onward seem to be trying to replicate some of the simple Time Lord tech I’ve shown to my friends and various locals I’ve saved.”

“That’s probably why the Time Lords don’t want you messing around with other civilisations,” Ace said, with a chuckle. “I’m glad you do anyway.”

“Me, too.” The door slid open. “Ah, that’s got it! Let’s go,” the Doctor said, turning to Brian. “You’ve been here before, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Brian got to his feet. “Various performance licenses have to be obtained and regularly renewed to allow me to perform off-world. Xeno 10 guards all its resources very closely, including human ones.”

“Then you can lead us to the ambassador’s office.”

“The ambassador doesn’t handle such mundane tasks personally. But I’m sure I have fans among the lesser staff who will guide us there.” He shook his head. “Though I still maintain that this will likely make things worse for us.”

“I’ve never been one for sitting patiently,” the Doctor said. “Not when there are other options. Come on, then. Lead the way.”

Brian grimaced about it, but duly led them out of the cell, and back towards the main lobby of the embassy. They hadn’t gotten very far into the lobby when a young woman let out a bit of a shriek, then ran over to Brian and suddenly threw her arms around him. Only moments later, she gasped, and let go again, stepping back. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to—I was just so excited and relieved and—”

“I take it you’re a fan?” Brian asked, smiling at her much more charmingly than Ace would have thought him capable of.

The woman nodded with a happy smile. “I was at the concert last night, and—I was so worried about you! If anything had happened to you, I’d have died of grief, I know I would.” Her eyes seemed to be growing misty at the very _idea_ of harm coming to her idol.

“There, you see?” the Doctor said quietly, stepping closer to Brian.

“Oh!” The woman moved over closer to the Doctor. “You’re the one who saved him! Thank you so much!” She took hold of both of the Doctor’s hands. “I can’t ever thank you enough. All of us owe you such a huge debt of gratitude. Life wouldn’t be worth living without Brian Slade!” She let go of the Doctor’s hands and turned back to Brian. “I expect you’ve thanked her properly,” she added, with a little wink.

“Not yet, but I’m certainly planning on it,” Brian said, casting his eyes in the Doctor’s direction. It wasn’t a look that most people would call lecherous, but in the context it felt downright perverted. “Perhaps you’d like to join us?” he added, looking back at his fan.

She flushed bright crimson, and stammered wordlessly for a moment, before timidly shaking her head. “Oh, no, I’m not…I’m not worthy. Besides, if you add a third, it should really be Curt.”

“Well. Of course.” Brian didn’t exactly seem excited by the idea.

Ace cleared her throat before stepping into the conversation before it could get any more twisted. “I don’t suppose you could show us to the ambassador’s office?” she asked Brian’s fan. “Brian wanted to talk to him about last night’s events.”

“Oh! Yes, of course I can. It’s just right upstairs. I’ll show you.” Giddily, the young woman led the way to a wide, curling staircase—the kind of thing dramatically-dressed actresses playing the lady of the house slowly descended in old movies—to a massive set of double doors. Beyond the doors there was a waiting room with very elegant furniture that looked like it would have been antique even in Ace’s time. The room had three doors other than the one they entered by. “The ambassador’s office is through there,” the fan said, pointing out the door opposite them. “But I think he’s in a meeting right now.”

“We can wait here, then,” Brian assured her.

His fan thanked him again—though Ace wasn’t entirely sure for what, when they were the ones who should have been thanking her—then left the three of them alone.

The Doctor looked at Brian uncertainly. “Exactly what is it you’re planning to do to thank me properly?” she asked.

Brian laughed. “I could show you right now, if you’d like.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Ace said. “Come on, Doctor, I _know_ you’re not that naïve! He’s an oversexed male rock star, and you’re a woman—what else would he want to do?!”

The Doctor just stood there for a moment, looking perplexed. “Oh.” She shook her head. “I suppose I still have things I need to get used to, being a woman.” She frowned. “I’m millennia older than you are, you know,” she told Brian.

“Who cares? I’ve been with older men before. Why should older women be an issue?” Inwardly, Ace had to admit that was rather a novel way to look at it. Maybe even a little refreshing. “And it sounds like you’ve never even had sex before.”

“That’s really none of your business.” The Doctor frowned. “Besides, I am a grandfather, you know. Er, grandmother now, I guess.”

Brian shrugged. “Still haven’t had sex as a woman, though, from the sound of it.”

“Is changing your sex really that common in this time period?” Ace asked. “No one seems to be batting an eye at it.”

He cast an expression of disgust in her direction. “How transphobic.”

“I have no idea what that word is,” Ace sighed.

“It wasn’t coined until the 2010s,” the Doctor told her. “Or was it the 2000s? Well, around there. After you left Earth, at any rate. Anyway, my situation is different from what you’re thinking,” she added, turning back to Brian. “And I’m not interested in having any kind of carnal relations with you, so you can forget about it. If you want to thank me, you can actually say ‘thank you,’ which I notice you haven’t done yet. Or you could at least promise to be more mindful of how your actions will affect your devoted fans like that woman who brought us here. How do you think you would have felt if you had successfully faked your death and that had prompted her or others like her to commit suicide?”

“No one would kill themselves over a performer’s death.”

“There were women who killed themselves when Rudolph Valentino died,” the Doctor corrected him.

“What sort of music did he perform?” Brian asked.

“He was an actor,” Ace told him. “Even I know that.” Though silent movies weren’t really her thing.

Brian shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

“Considering whole religions have turned into mangled myths between my time and yours, that means nothing.”

“Let’s just go see the ambassador,” the Doctor said.

“He’s in a meeting,” Brian reminded her.

“Best time to see him. He’s guaranteed to be there.” The Doctor smiled. “Besides, if the meeting is about that war he wants to start…” Without finishing her thought, she walked over to the door leading into the ambassador’s office and opened it. It wasn’t until she did so that Ace realized how strange it was that this room had old-fashioned wooden doors on hinges unlike the sci-fi sliding doors in the rest of the building. How far did their interior decorator want to go in pursuit of the whole antique—or as they probably saw it, “ancient”—look in that room?

“How dare you?!” a man’s voice shouted as soon as the door opened. “Who are you?”

Ace ran over to join her as the Doctor entered the ambassador’s office. It maintained the late 19th century feel of its antechamber, except for the various high-tech gadgets on the ornate wooden desk, and the video screen mounted on the wall.

“You don’t look like you’re in a meeting,” the Doctor commented.

“Indeed not,” Brian agreed as he entered the room. “Surely you weren’t telling transparent lies to get out of meeting with me.”

The ambassador scowled at Brian. “I was just on a video call with the Prime Minister,” he said, “and he’s entirely displeased with every aspect of the current situation. Just how was your security so lax that an assassin got inside the concert hall?!”

Brian smiled tightly, and sat down in the single chair facing the ambassador’s desk, leaving Ace and the Doctor to stand. “I’m afraid President Reynolds reported the truth, before he decided to ignore it and begin spouting lies. The so-called assassin does work for me, and the weapon was merely a stun device tricked out to look fatal. It was just a stunt—part of the show.”

“If it was part of the show, why did the show get stopped over it?”

Brian cast a glance at the Doctor before looking back at the ambassador. “Some of my newer band members didn’t know about the stunt, and got…overexcited.”

The ambassador scowled, and massaged his temples with one hand. “You’re not making my job any easier, boy.”

“And you’re not making mine any more pleasant.” Brian shrugged. “Neither of those things fit our respective job descriptions, so I fail to see the importance of bringing it up.”

“Do you _want_ to cause a war?” The ambassador shook his head, then suddenly banged his fist on his desk. “You _do_ , don’t you?! You traitor!”

“Whoa, wait, don’t you think you’re jumping to too many conclusions?” the Doctor asked, moving forward to try and position herself a bit between them. “We’re here to prevent a war, not start one.”

The ambassador looked at her and laughed. “ _You_ might be, but I’m not convinced about _him_. His sympathies have lain with these Xeno 3 barbarians for years.”

“Really, such venom,” Brian said. “Most citizens of both planets do not think of the other world as being particularly foreign. It’s only you bureaucrats who look at this solar system and see potential enemies and threats.”

“It’s abnormal,” the ambassador insisted. “Marrying one of them _and_ publicising your extra-marital affair with another!” Brian was married? No one had mentioned _that_ up to now! If he was married, where was his spouse? Or had she (he?) left because of the affair?

Brian sighed, and shook his head. “It’s not abnormal in the least.”

“Publicising an affair is definitely abnormal,” Ace muttered, but no one seemed to have heard her.

“All of this is irrelevant,” the Doctor said. “You’ve had it explained to you now. There was no conspiracy to kill your king or start a war. It was just a singer’s publicity stunt gone awry. So you can back off on the warmongering rhetoric in your public addresses.”

“You ought to be telling that to President Reynolds, not to me,” the ambassador said. “As long as he plans on using this as an overture to war, we will have no choice but to gear up accordingly.”

“Curt is speaking to him even now,” Brian assured the ambassador. “The local government will back off its aggressive posture, and so will you. Yes?”

The ambassador frowned, and began drumming his fingers on the desk. Finally, he turned to look at the Doctor. “Who are you, exactly?” he asked. “I don’t recall seeing your face on the report of Xeno 10 citizens brought to Xeno 3 for the concert tour. You or the girl.”

“Ah, no, we’re new to Brian’s group,” the Doctor replied. “Just travellers who happened to get involved.”

“And yet you’re the ones he chose to bring with him for this meeting?” There was more than a tinge of suspicion in his voice.

“It’s more like we forced him to come with us, really,” Ace replied. No point in letting it sound like Brian was the one with a conscience!

“I see. Which brings me roundly back to my original question: _who are you_?”

“Oh, I’m the Doctor, and this is Ace.”

“The Doctor…?” The ambassador’s face came over all puzzled for a moment, and he picked up one of his gadgets off the desk, inputting some data into it. An image came up on the video screen on the wall, showing an older man with curly white hair, in a rich velvet coat and wearing a ruffle-sleeved blouse like the one Arthur had borrowed, standing with a blonde woman in what looked rather like a karate gi made from dark cloth.

“Oh, how nostalgic!” the Doctor exclaimed. “Haven’t seen Jo in ages.”

The image was replaced by several more in such rapid succession that Ace couldn’t fully focus on the images, and was mostly aware of flashes of curly hair, big grins, and bright colours. Eventually, it settled on a picture of Ace and the Doctor watching as some of Helen A’s people painted the TARDIS blue again, replacing that horrible pink. The ambassador looked at Ace long and hard, looked back at the image, then looked back at Ace again. His lips pressed into a tight line, he turned towards Brian, who was watching him idly, giving no impression of having even looked at the images on the screen.

“I believe I’d like to speak to these two women without you listening in,” the ambassador said.

“ _You_ are dismissing _me_?” Brian’s voice was chilly.

“Brian, this whole mess is your fault, so do as he asks.”

“Technically, it is _your_ fault,” Brian told the Doctor. “If you hadn’t interfered with the show—”

“If I hadn’t interfered, the mess would be even bigger and harder to defuse! Now go wait in the hall!”

Brian pursed his lips, and drummed his fingernails on the arm of the chair. “I suppose there is little point in my remaining here,” he admitted. “But we will be having a discussion about this later.”

“Believe me, I plan on it.”

Ace had to fight not to laugh. Brian had been trying to threaten the Doctor, but he was the one who looked a bit cowed as he left the room.

As Brian was leaving, the ambassador got to his feet, and walked over to the video screen. He turned back to look at them, crossing his arms. “I don’t know that I would take any of this seriously, if it wasn’t for the girl. Legendary figures do not turn up every day. But if this is really you in this image…”

“It is,” the Doctor assured him. “A long time ago.”

“A lot longer for her than for me,” Ace added. “I’m an ordinary human who ages just like everybody else. And I definitely can’t get younger.” She had a feeling that twenty or thirty years from now, she’d probably be envying that ability. Right now, she wouldn’t want to be any younger than she already was. Sometimes, she rather wanted to be just a bit older, in fact.

The ambassador sighed. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Ghosts?” An old fear squirmed inside her, but Ace did all she could to dismiss it, reminding herself how that house had never really been haunted, just tainted by an old, alien evil…

“There are a lot of real phenomena that are blamed on ghosts, but in my experience, they’ve always had non-spectral explanations,” the Doctor said. “Even if in some cases they’re awfully close to being ghosts. Why?”

“When I first arrived on Xeno 3, I was warned that the embassy was haunted,” the ambassador told them. “Doors slid open on their own, sometimes messages were received that had never been sent. Anything automatic could go haywire. That’s why most of our crucial doors are wooden. Our kitchen is entirely antiquated as well, without any automation.”

“Hand-prepared food always tastes better anyway,” the Doctor said, smiling.

“That’s hardly the point.” The ambassador shook his head. “My first public statement about the botched murder last night was made because I had received a high security communiqué from the Prime Minister informing me of the true purpose of the attack. The one this morning was based on an intelligence report leaked to us from a source inside the Xeno 3 government.”

“And neither message was genuine?” the Doctor surmised.

“I can’t speak to the authenticity of the one this morning. But the Prime Minister assured me that he sent no such message to me, nor did anyone else in his government.” He looked up at them earnestly, a fear in his eyes. “Your exploits are the stuff of legend. But can you stop a ghost?”

“A real one? Don’t know.” The Doctor shrugged. “This? I can stop this. This is much too subtle to be a ghost. If I was to be reduced to spectral energy trying to wreak havoc on the living, the last thing I’d want to be is subtle.”

“Why did you send Brian away to tell us this?” Ace asked. “Unless you’re ashamed to have your citizens learn you believe in ghosts.”

“The Prime Minister is not convinced by the reports that have come to him from all the embassy staff, regarding the haunting,” the ambassador told her. “He thinks Brian Slade is working with President Reynolds to start a war. Perhaps on behalf of his wife or his lover. There is also the possibility that his wife might be a hostage of her own government. She hasn’t been seen publicly with him in some time.”

“I wouldn’t hang about either, if my husband was sleeping with another man,” Ace said. “Nothing suspicious about that. She’s probably gone home to her parents.”

The ambassador shrugged. “She was seen with them at first, and didn’t seem to care about her husband’s infidelity. If she was one of our citizens, I probably would have had someone look into it, in fear of foul play. But it is hardly in Xeno 10’s best interests to investigate our most valuable export in fear he might have murdered his wife.”

“He’s not really capable of murder, is he?” Ace asked. He didn’t _seem_ dangerous. A bit of a creep, but not a dangerous one. Other than dangerous to the chastity of everyone around him, anyway.

“Everyone is capable of murder,” the ambassador insisted.

“No, not really.” The Doctor shook her head. “I don’t think he’s the murdering type. Cruelty to people he’s not directly exposed to is very different from purposefully ending the life of someone so close to you. We’ll ask around about her whereabouts, but if she’s in trouble, I don’t think Brian caused it. Not directly, at any rate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I wish I'd been taking notes on the way she shut down Byron when he was making his pass at her. It was so much cooler than what I managed here. (Not that I'd have lifted it, of course, but I could have used it as a guidebook to improve her shutting Brian down.)
> 
> Also, I'm sorry about how abruptly this chapter ends. I didn't remember ending it quite so suddenly, but unless I accidentally deleted entire lines at some point...


	7. Chapter 7

Arthur was still wearing only his trousers when the door to the cell opened again. “That was fast,” Curt commented, as he shrugged back into his T-shirt. It took longer for Arthur to get his blouse back on, and he was still buttoning it up as they both left the cell. Arthur could swear the smile on the screen-face of the robot became more of a smirk at the sight of Arthur’s dishevelled state.

“The president will see you now,” the robot told them, and began leading them back through the maze of passages inside the building.

“It’s been what, two hours, tops?” Curt said, frowning. “That’s…shit, is he really that desperate to start a war?”

“Maybe he wants us to help prevent one,” Arthur suggested.

“That’s not Reynolds’ style,” Curt sighed. “He’s a real—well, you’ll see.”

On that ominous note, they fell silent until they arrived at an imposing doorway at the end of a long corridor containing the portraits of dozens—if not hundreds—of grim-faced, scowling men in soulless suits or military gear. “Please have a pleasant chat,” the robot said (bizarrely), before opening the door.

Curt walked through the door without any sign of trepidation, but Arthur hung back, barely passing through the doorframe. They were emerging right into Reynolds’ office, which had been designed—as far as Arthur could tell—to intimidate the visitor. The floor was covered in a thick rug depicting the emblem of Xeno 3, which was also painted on the desk, and on all three of the room’s walls. There were no other standard doors, but Arthur could spot thin lines here and there where doors were camouflaged as a regular part of the wall.

Reynolds himself, a solid man in late middle-age with badly-dyed black hair, sat at the desk, and two of the chairs facing the desk were filled with men in formal suits, while half a dozen others—some in suits and some in military uniforms—stood behind them or along the walls. Reynolds’ face took on a look of rage as Curt approached the desk. “Who let you in here?!” Reynolds demanded.

“That security robot,” Curt answered, undaunted by such a powerful man screaming at him.

Reynolds scowled, and pressed a button on one of the devices on his desk. “Tell tech support those fucking robots are malfunctioning again! And tell them to fix them _right_ this time!” He returned his gaze towards Curt. “This is a high clearance meeting on planetary security. No faggot performers allowed.”

Curt didn’t budge.

“Mr. President, if I may,” one of the men in suits said tentatively.

Reynolds looked at him with an impatient expression. “What is it, Smithson?”

“Perhaps if he would be willing to cooperate, it would cut through some of our…questions…about the situation?” Smithson said, a hesitance in his phrasing that sounded almost frightened to Arthur’s ears.

Reynolds stared at him for a moment, then turned a cold glance at Curt. “Maybe so.” He frowned. “Well? Why did your disgusting boyfriend try to fake his own death?”

“It was a stupid stunt,” Curt said, shaking his head. “Just Brian wanting to be the centre of attention, like always.”

“What about all the warmongering talk from Xeno 10?” one of the standing men said, adjusting the medals on his uniform’s chest. “Their Prime Minister clearly wants war.”

Curt shrugged. “Not really our fault if he does. Brian never even wondered how the government was going to react to his death. Just wanted to hear what everyone was going to say about him at his funeral.”

Somehow, Arthur wondered if that hadn’t been the _real_ reason, not that rubbish he had spouted about wanting to use a false resurrection to take over the galaxy. When no one among the politicians seemed to know what to say, and Curt wasn’t adding anything else, Arthur forced himself to walk a little further into the room. “Um, Brian’s at the Xeno 10 embassy right now,” he told them. “Trying to explain to the ambassador that there’s no need for a war. So…um…” His courage began to fail him as all the other men in the room stared at him.

“You really have an obsession with these foreign men, don’t you?” one of the suited men asked, looking at Curt.

“It’s that accent. Drives me crazy,” Curt replied, grinning. “Look, this is pretty simple, okay? No one’s trying to start a war. There’s no traps. Just a lot of hot air between you and the ambassador. So if you both stop screaming about war, there won’t be one.”

“After it’s gone this far, it isn’t that simple,” Smithson said. “The president’s image is on the line. If he just backs down…”

“What?” Curt prompted, when the other man didn’t finish. “What could possibly happen just because he shuts up for once?”

“I would look like a coward and a weakling,” Reynolds told him. “I will not have that. I will not besmirch Xeno 3’s reputation by making us look weak!”

“If…” Arthur started, then stopped immediately, biting his lip. The looks of hate they were all giving him! It was like being in a whole room full of his father.

“No one’s gonna bite you,” Curt assured him, gesturing him closer. “If you’ve got an idea, let’s hear it.” He smiled at Arthur so warmly that it drove away the cold dread caused by the other men.

“Well, it’s just if…if you meet with the ambassador,” he said, looking at Reynolds, “and…um…you know…have peace talks…it won’t look weak, but there won’t be a war…”

“It _is_ standard procedure,” one of the military men agreed. “One does not usually leap from a non-military incident to war without making some attempt to smooth over the issue. None of my men will object, and I don’t think any veterans will either.”

“I think it’s safe to say that those of our citizens who most want to see us go to war with Xeno 10 are also the ones who would have preferred to see Slade actually killed,” another man said. “They aren’t really pushing for this particular war; they won’t object to seeing peace negotiations.”

Reynolds scowled, and rubbed his chin for at least a full minute. “It goes against all my better judgment to back down from a fight,” he said, “but if the voters don’t want the war, I suppose can agree to talk with the enemy. Perhaps settle for economic sanctions.”

“How the fuck are you gonna justify _that_?” Curt demanded. “It’s got nothing to do with you!”

“Curt, let the ambassador worry about that,” Arthur urged. “As long as he’s willing to talk, it’s not really our problem.”

Curt sighed. “Maybe not.” He looked at Reynolds. “But you _are_ going to talk to the ambassador, right?”

“We’ll send off a request for peace talks right away,” Smithson assured him. “So you can leave now.”

“Yeah, I know when I’m not wanted,” Curt said, but if he was actually willing to leave whenever he wasn’t wanted, surely they would have left that office as soon as they arrived! Arthur didn’t say anything, of course, just waited for Curt to start leaving, and hurried after him. The last thing he wanted was to stay behind in a place like that!

***

“Come on, you really can’t tell me _anything_?” Ace moved closer to where the Doctor was sitting, watching the silenced video screen. “Not even a little hint?”

The Doctor sighed. “You know I can’t. Did we tell your grandmother anything about _her_ future?”

Ace coughed. “Well, accidentally…”

“But she didn’t know that was her future, so it didn’t matter.” The Doctor shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything more about your future than I already have.”

“But all you’ve told me is where and when _my_ Doctor will pick me up in a few days. That’s nothing!”

“And it’s all that it’s safe to tell you.” The Doctor frowned. “That’s right, it is only a few days away, isn’t it? We need to make sure this is all done with before then, or my past self won’t be able to pick you up on time. The TARDIS won’t want to land so close to another version of herself.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, until the video screen began playing the news. The Doctor turned up the sound for that, but it didn’t seem very enlightening to Ace. Most of the stories had nothing to do with Brian, his stunt, or the war that was brewing because of it. After the news was over, the Doctor got up, and announced that they should see if they could find Curt and ask how things went during his audience with President Reynolds.

“That’s assuming he actually got in to see him, and got back again,” Ace pointed out.

Despite how improbable it seemed that Curt could have returned successfully already, they set out to look for him. Asking around, they heard from numerous sources that he had indeed returned from the presidential residence, and that he and Brian were talking to the wardrobe supervisors.

They must have just finished up their conversation with wardrobe, because they were in the corridor headed back towards the lift when the Doctor and Ace encountered them. The Doctor insisted that Curt tell her everything about his meeting with President Reynolds, but the account seemed highly truncated to Ace. It concluded with Curt shaking his head. “Probably would’ve worked better if we could’ve sent Mandy instead of me going. That motherfucker Reynolds is a real homophobe.”

“Who’s Mandy?” Ace asked.

“My wife,” Brian said. “She’s also from Xeno 3.”

“Speaking of your wife,” the Doctor interjected, “just where _is_ she? The ambassador told us she hasn’t made a public appearance with you in some time.”

“Her mother is very ill, so she went home to look after her,” Brian said, shaking his head. “I told her it was foolhardy, considering how unpleasant her parents are both to her and to me, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“I hope you had told her about how your little stunt was intended to turn out,” Ace commented.

From the way Brian’s face momentarily blanched, he hadn’t told her. In fact, the slightly agape look in his eyes suggested to Ace that telling her hadn’t even _occurred_ to him. “Mandy is very clever,” he said, shaking his head. “She wouldn’t have been fooled.”

“Not sure she’d have cared even if it _was_ true,” Curt muttered.

Brian shot Curt a cold glance, then turned and stalked off down the hall without a word.

“Trouble in paradise?” Ace asked, trying not to laugh.

“He’s been pissy ever since the concert. Doesn’t like it when his plans don’t play out just right.” Curt sighed. “Look, you’re not thinking of bugging Mandy about this, are you?”

“Is there a reason we shouldn’t talk to her?” the Doctor asked.

“Aside from the fact that she’s babysitting her sick mother, there’s the time difference—she’s on the other side of the world right now. Opposite quatrosphere. And she doesn’t know about anything; Brian didn’t even start planning this stuff until after she left.”

Curt set off following Brian, and the Doctor frowned pensively.

“Before you start analysing what he said—or whatever you’re about to say—what’s a quatrosphere?” Ace asked. “Is it just what it sounds like?”

“Exactly,” the Doctor said. “It’s half a hemisphere. Xeno 3 doesn’t have the handy continents Earth has, being largely interconnected archipelagos, so they needed a simple way of talking about it. I do hope the ambassador wasn’t on the right track in talking about Mrs. Slade having been forcibly removed from the picture, though.”

“Brian really doesn’t seem the type—” Though his behaviour since the concert was starting to make him seem more like he was the type after all.

“No, but that doesn’t mean everyone working for him is above suspicion.” The Doctor sighed. “I suppose we’d better ask around. Just in case.”

“Oh, won’t _that_ be fun,” Ace muttered, shaking her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this was such a short chapter. It just turned out that there were two short scenes in between the two longest scenes in the fic, so...


	8. Chapter 8

Arthur had been in the cafeteria ever since getting back from the presidential residence. Suddenly, he felt awkward about the idea of spending more time with the Flaming Creatures; would they be jealous, and feel that he had betrayed them if they found out what had happened between him and Curt? Not to mention that he was terrified that Brian would be enraged if he found out about it. But the cafeteria was a safe haven to worry in peace; there was no one paying him the slightest bit of attention.

But what was going to happen to him if it turned out people got upset about it? So long as the Creatures wanted him with them, he felt sure he’d be able to stay with the tour. But if they felt he had betrayed them, they wouldn’t want him around anymore. And if Brian was actually jealous despite what Curt had said, he’d surely be thrown out. Then what? He still had no money; what would he live on?

He was hiding out at the most inconspicuous corner table, nursing a cup of by now thoroughly cold tea, trying to come up with some other way to support himself, when Shannon came into the cafeteria. She didn’t even have to look around before making a line straight for him. Was this it? Was she here to kick him out?

Shannon sat down opposite Arthur without so much as a by-your-leave. Arthur was almost destroyed by the knowledge that this small woman—barely any older than he was—was in such a position of power, not only over Arthur but over almost everything about the tour, as Brian’s right hand. “I heard what happened,” she said.

“Ah…I…” What was he supposed to say? He hadn’t been trying to break up Brian and Curt’s relationship—he had idolised them together!—but if he said so, wouldn’t it sound like nothing but a petty excuse? More importantly, what if she meant something else entirely, and no one knew yet what he and Curt had done in that waiting room?

“Were you merely submitting to his desires, or were you serious about it?”

“Huh? Uh…” Arthur smiled uncomfortably. “I don’t know what you want to hear…?”

Shannon sighed deeply. “I will be more plain if I have your word that you won’t tell Brian about any of this.”

Arthur nodded. “I doubt he’d listen to me even if I tried.” Brian didn’t seem to like listening to anyone, and that was with people who _hadn’t_ taken his place in Curt’s bed.

“That’s certainly true.” Shannon smiled tightly. “Then I’ll be blunt. Are you interested in having a serious relationship with Curt Wild, or was that merely a momentary fling to pass the time?”

“Well, I…I mean…I would, I mean…yes, I—I want that, but I also don’t. I wasn’t trying to break them up, I promise!”

“And if I offered to help you do just that?”

“What?” Arthur tried not to let his shock and horror show on his face. One of Brian’s closest employees was trying to sabotage Brian’s love life?

“No matter what he may think right now, Brian’s relationship with Curt Wild has been the worst thing ever to happen to him,” Shannon said, her face stony. “Brian won’t listen to reason where Curt is concerned, but if someone else comes along and seduces Curt away from him…” She smiled tightly. “He _will_ listen to jealousy. I believe that is the only way that Brian can be freed from the shackles of this relationship.”

Shackles? Worst thing ever to happen to him? Was she really even talking about the same relationship? It was only when Brian got together with Curt that his career had taken off from mere stardom to being the hottest thing in the galaxy. How could Shannon think that had been a mistake? “I don’t…is this a test?”

Shannon frowned. “I am completely serious. If you are interested in a serious relationship with Curt Wild, I will help you to break them up.”

Arthur shook his head. “As much as I’d love to have him for myself, I would never want to do anything to come between him and Brian. What they have is on a completely different level: ethereal, perf—”

Arthur stopped speaking suddenly at the horrifying vision out of the corner of his eye that his father was headed towards him. When he turned his head in the direction of the door, he was only slightly relieved to see it wasn’t his father; it was rather the Xeno 10 ambassador, who in person was so much of a type with Arthur’s father that they could have been long-lost brothers. The ambassador stopped at the edge of the table and looked at them. “This building is like a bloody maze,” he complained. “Are either of you important?”

“What do you want?” Shannon asked, apparently utterly nonplussed by talking to someone so important.

“I need to speak to the Doctor,” the ambassador said.

Shannon scowled. “She was fired for ruining the concert. You’ll have to look elsewhere.”

Arthur shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. She and Ace were still here this morning.”

“Do you know where they are, young man?” the ambassador asked eagerly. “I need to speak with her right away. It’s urgent.”

Arthur got to his feet. “I know which suite they were assigned to. I don’t know if they’re in it, but I’ll show you to the suite.” Anything to get away from Shannon and her disturbing offer!

The ambassador followed without a word as Arthur led him out of the cafeteria and to the lift. They continued on in silence until they reached the Doctor’s door, and there was no response from within. “I guess they’re out,” Arthur concluded, biting his lip.

“I _need_ to talk to her,” the ambassador reiterated.

Arthur nodded. “We can ask around. Maybe they haven’t gone far.”

Backtracking to the lounge, Arthur found the other short-term hires sitting there, so he asked them if they’d seen the Doctor. “She was asking questions about Brian’s wife,” the alien one said.

“I think she went looking for Brian’s band members,” the dark-skinned one added.

Arthur thanked them, and led the ambassador back to the lift.

“You seem like a useful, industrious young man,” the ambassador commented, as they waited for the lift. “What are you doing wasting your time with these people?”

“I don’t think it’s a waste of my time at all.” How could it ever be a waste to be involved with such a magical group?

The lift arrived before the ambassador could answer, and it took them up to the floor where Brian’s band was staying. As soon as they stepped out of the lift, Arthur could hear the sound of the Doctor’s voice, chattering away about something. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but the tones made it sound like nothing important, and certainly nothing interrogative.

“Ah, finally!” the ambassador said, and set off in the direction of the Doctor’s voice, without waiting for Arthur. He followed anyway, though. Best to keep on the Doctor’s good side; if things went so badly that he couldn’t stay with the tour, maybe she’d take him someplace far away, someplace he could start over where no one would treat him like a monster for being himself.

The Doctor evidently heard the ambassador’s (rather heavy) footfalls, because she stopped talking before they reached her, and turned to face them. “That doesn’t look like the face of someone who wants to thank me for stopping a war,” she commented.

“As of yet, it’s not been stopped,” the ambassador agreed, nodding. “I received a message from President Reynolds, expressing his desire for a peace conference.”

“Well, that’s fantastic!” the Doctor said, beaming. “What could be so wrong about that?”

“Naturally, I had to contact the Prime Minister before I could answer him,” the ambassador continued. “Legal requirement, you understand. And I wanted to know exactly what our positions were on various points likely to come up. The normal requirements of the job.” He took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled it again. “While I was still speaking with the Prime Minister, my secretary brought in the text of another message that had come from President Reynolds, lambasting me for my rude reply to his message.”

The Doctor frowned and nodded. “Your communications channels are obviously compromised.”

“Tell me something I _haven’t_ already figured out!” the ambassador shouted.

“Now, now, calm down! What did you do when you got the message?”

“I explained the situation to the Prime Minister, and we agreed that until the issue is cleared up, no text-only messages are to be sent, and any suspicious video calls must be backed up with information that has never passed along the communications system.” He shook his head. “I tried to call President Reynolds and explain that the reply had not come from me, but his secretary would neither transfer my call to him nor pass along my message. We seem to be even more on the path to war than we were before.”

“I’ll go speak to him in person,” the Doctor said. “Explain the situation as an uninvolved third party.”

“He’ll think you’re from Xeno 10,” Arthur said. “You sound like you are.”

“Surely this President Reynolds has access to the same historical data you do?” the Doctor asked, looking at the ambassador.

“I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason he wouldn’t, but…he is not known for his interest in or respect for history. I wouldn’t expect him to be aware of you.”

“Well, he will be after today,” the Doctor replied, heading for the elevator. It almost sounded like a threat, but surely she wouldn’t be so foolish…? Worried that she might do something everyone would later regret, Arthur hurried after her.

“You don’t have to come,” the Doctor said to him, as they waited for the lift.

“I’ve been there before,” Arthur said, in the first excuse he could think of. “It might make it easier for us to get in to see him?”

“Hmm. Well, I suppose it can’t hurt. Although who we really need is…” The Doctor’s voice faded out the lift arrived. Instead of pressing the button to go down to the ground floor, the Doctor instructed the lift to go up to the floor that was private for Brian and Curt.

“We’re not allowed up there,” Arthur reminded her, even as she used her device to force the lift to proceed.

“That’s never stopped me before. I see ‘no entry’ signs as invitations.”

When the lift arrived, Arthur was tempted to stay in it. If the Doctor wanted to get in trouble, she could do it alone. And yet…maybe this would somehow give him a chance to apologise to Brian, since he surely knew about Arthur’s momentary intimacy with Curt.

The penthouse was laid out differently than the other floors. There was a short hallway that ended in a single, closed door. The Doctor walked right up to it and knocked loudly. “I’m going to come in anyway, so you may as well open the door,” she shouted, as she knocked again. She was just getting out her sonic as the door slid open.

Brian stood in the doorway, his face utterly passive, until his gaze started turning in Arthur’s direction. Then Arthur couldn’t keep looking at him, overcome by his own guilt. How could he have allowed his own desires to overpower his sense of right and wrong so badly? Arthur wanted to shrink into a hole in the wall and dissolve. How had this happened? How could he have allowed himself into a position where the idol he had wanted so much to meet must surely hate him?

“I have to go see President Reynolds,” the Doctor informed Brian, “and I think it’ll make the process go more smoothly if you come with me. It is, after all, over you and your stunt that this whole mess got started, and both sides are still trying to pretend that the fake attack is at the centre of it all.”

Brian sighed. “I suppose I must,” he conceded, stepping through the door.

They remained in silence all the way down the lift, and it was only when they were approaching the exit from building that Arthur suddenly found himself with cold feet. “What about Ace?” he asked. “Aren’t we bringing her with us?”

“Oh, Ace will be fine without us,” the Doctor said. “She’s off gathering information.”

Brian scowled at the Doctor. “Surely you aren’t still thinking that there’s been foul play. It’s absolute nonsense.”

“I told the ambassador we would look into it, and we are.”

“There is nothing for either of you to find on the subject.”

“Then there’s no problem, is there?” the Doctor asked cheerfully.

“I suppose not,” Brian agreed.

As they left the complex and began walking through the city, Arthur kept trying to come up with something to say, some way of apologising. He couldn’t possibly explain that he had been worried at the time about upsetting Brian, because then _Curt_ might get in trouble. Better to take all the blame on himself; then at least Curt and Brian hopefully wouldn’t break up, and could still stay happy together.

When they arrived at the presidential residence this time, Arthur was quite sure that all those soldiers were laughing at him. They weren’t _really_ laughing, but he felt as though they were laughing inside their heads. Their eyes certainly looked amused, and some of them were smirking at him. Just how many people knew what had passed between him and Curt in that waiting room?

The robot outside the front door looked directly at Arthur when they approached it. “Back again so soon?” it asked.

Arthur flinched, and couldn’t think of anything to say in response.

“I am the Doctor, and I need to speak to President Reynolds,” the Doctor said, commanding the robot’s attention. “It’s a matter of galactic security. I have special clearance.” She flashed open a black wallet in the robot’s direction.

“Is that blank paper supposed to mean something to me?” the robot asked.

The Doctor turned it around in her hand and looked at it. The brief flash of the paper inside that Arthur could see didn’t look blank to him. “Ah…must have left my ID in my other coat,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Look, it’s just very important, all right? I’ve brought Brian Slade with me, see?”

The robot turned its head towards Brian, then looked back at the Doctor. “Yes, you have,” it agreed.

“And I need to see the president.”

“Please wait while I verify your clearance.” The robot stood motionless for about thirty seconds. “You may proceed.”

The flat-faced robot was waiting for them inside, just like before. “What in the bloody hell is that hideous thing?” Brian asked, the words seeming to leap unbidden from his lips as soon as he saw it.

“It _is_ a curious design, isn’t it?” the Doctor agreed.

“They certainly weren’t using those things when I was here before,” Brian commented.

“Curt seemed to think it wasn’t anything unusual,” Arthur said, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He could _feel_ Brian hating him for having the gall to mention Curt—to _think_ about Curt—even without Brian having to look at him.

“If you will follow me, I will take you to the waiting room so you can see the president,” the flat-faced robot said.

“I’d rather see the president right away,” the Doctor told it. “What kind of screen is that?” she asked. “It almost looks like an advanced LCD, but why would such an obsolete piece of tech be used in a robot as sophisticated as you are?”

“If the guest wishes to visit the robotics laboratories, I will require the permission of a supervisor,” the robot told her. “Would you like me to consult a supervisor?”

“Maybe later. Right now, we need to see the president.”

“Yes, I will take you to the waiting room.”

“No, right now.” The Doctor took her sonic out and pointed it at the robot, turning it on. Nothing happened for several seconds, then something popped at the robot’s neck, and its face shut off. “Hmm, that shouldn’t have happened.” She walked around the back of the robot, and opened an access panel. “Complete jumble back here. Looks like home repairs gone mad.”

“Doctor, do you really think this is a good idea?” Arthur asked. “Someone’s bound to come by…”

“Yes, that’s true.” The Doctor shut the robot’s access panel again. “Can you lead us to the president’s office from here?”

“I think so.” As anything was better than waiting there for someone to arrest them for breaking the robotic butler, Arthur started leading the way into the building. Since it had only been a matter of a few hours since he’d been there, he had no trouble finding his way back to the president’s office.

The Doctor opened the door without even bothering to knock, eliciting another roar of rage from the president. “How do you people keep waltzing in here without permission?!” he demanded, rising from the chair behind his desk. “Is it those fucking robots again?!”

“That’s not very presidential language,” the Doctor chided him, leaning against the back of a sofa. “And no, your robotic butler had a bit of a break-down in the lobby. We found our way here unaided.”

“I suppose you’re here on behalf of your ambassador, as if he hasn’t insulted me enough today already.”

The Doctor shook her head. “He’s not my ambassador, and I’m not here on his behalf, though he did send me. No, I’m here because I like to stick my nose into other peoples’ affairs, especially when it means I can prevent a lot of people dying.”

President Reynolds grimaced, and sat down again, glancing over at Brian for a moment, before returning his attention to the Doctor. “And just why did he send you? That last message left little unsaid.”

“Except that message did not come from the ambassador,” the Doctor told him, explaining about the compromised communications channels in the Xeno 10 embassy. “Based on the state of the circuit boards inside your robotic butler, I get the feeling you’ve had similar problems here, as well. Those botched circuits looked as though they were trying to cut all communications in or out of the robot.”

“Absurd.”

The Doctor shrugged. “Be that as it may, the ambassador did not send that message, and he _does_ want to hold peace talks. He’s amenable to meeting in the embassy, or in this residence, at your preference.”

“Bullshit. He just wants a convenient opportunity to murder me.”

“If he wanted that, I’m sure he could find ways that would make his own guilt far less obvious,” Brian said, with a smile that bordered on cruel. “Like sending in a party of assassins who have no clear connection to him,” he added, spreading his hands as if to gesture to the three of them.

Reynolds leapt out of his chair, drawing a gun as he hid behind it. “I won’t go down without a fight!”

“No one wants a fight—and no one wants you to take you down,” the Doctor sighed. “Brian was just making a point.”

The president moved slightly out from behind his chair, but didn’t put away the gun. “Why should I believe you?”

“I had rather hoped you might have heard of me,” the Doctor admitted. “The ambassador had access to quite a file on my past exploits in the service of peace and the preservation of lifekind.”

President Reynolds just looked at her warily, until the door to the office opened, and admitted one of the flat-faced robotic butlers. “Where the hell have you been?!” Reynolds shouted at it. “And where are the guards! I pressed the alarm button ten minutes ago!”

“We haven’t even been here that long,” Arthur muttered.

“Is there something you need, Mr. President?” the robot asked, evidently oblivious to the president’s anger at the delay.

Reynolds sighed, and sat down again. “Search the history files for a woman calling herself the Doctor.” He paused, and glanced at her. “That’s it, no name, just that codename?”

“It’s not exactly a codename, but it’s all I use off of Gallifrey.”

“Cross-reference with the name Gallifrey,” Reynolds added, looking at the robot. “And be quick about it!”

“Processing, please wait.” The robot’s face was replaced with a swirling icon. When the icon went away and the face returned to the screen, the face looked puzzled. “Numerous individuals have been found using that alias,” it said. “Request further clarification.”

The president pointed at the Doctor. “Her!” he shouted. “How can you need more clarification than that?!”

A sequence of other faces passed across the robot’s face-screen, starting with a very old man with snowy hair. A few of the men were young and attractive—particularly the blond one in cream-colored clothes and the dark-haired man in the striped suit towards the end—but most were much too old for Arthur’s tastes. The Doctor’s face was the last of them, making about the fourteenth face, if Arthur had counted right. “Records found,” the robot announced, its own face replacing the Doctor’s on the screen. “What do you wish to know?”

“Everything. What do the records say she did, to whom, and why?”

“The final individual, or all of them?” the robot asked.

“They’re all me,” the Doctor said.

“Just her,” the president said, ignoring her. Not that Arthur could really blame him for that; it hardly seemed likely that one person could live long enough to so thoroughly reinvent himself—herself?—over and over again. The plastic surgery bills alone must have been astronomical. Unless maybe she did some kind of brain transplant thing, or a consciousness migration, if that was even possible.

“At the time of the war between New Earth 5 and Altair 7, she intervened to bring the war to a peaceful resolution by—”

“Wait, don’t say anything further!” the Doctor suddenly shouted. “Whatever that is, I haven’t done it yet. Don’t create a paradox by telling me what I’m going to do later on.”

Reynolds just stared at her, then pursed his lips in disgust. “Fine.” He looked at the robot. “Is there anything in that file to indicate that the Doctor is a threat?” he asked.

“There is one individual who called himself the Doctor who might be a threat,” the robot answered. “He was a warrior fighting for Gallifrey during the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks.”

“I’m not in the mood for fairy stories. Just tell me if this woman is dangerous or not!”

“Negative,” the robot replied. “The records indicate that she is only a threat to those causing harm to others. So long as you do not attack, you are safe. The majority of the records pertain to preventing wars and stopping invasions.”

Reynolds scowled, but did put the gun back in the desk drawer from which he had pulled it. “Very well, leave us.”

The robot left, and the door slid shut behind it. “All right, I’ll listen to you,” Reynolds said, eying the Doctor warily, “but I’m not meeting with that backstabbing ambassador without a regiment of my guards to protect me!”

“That seems excessive, but if that’s the only way you can feel safe, so be it. The ambassador doesn’t want a war, and neither do the people of Xeno 10,” the Doctor assured him. “When and where do you want to have the meeting?”

“Here, in this office,” Reynolds said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll give him the message. He’ll be here.” The Doctor smiled pleasantly, then turned to look at Arthur and Brian. “All right, that’s that. Let’s go. I want to have a look at the workshop where they make those robots.”

“That’s classified! No admittance!” the president shouted.

The Doctor sighed. “Fine, I’ll just go, then.”

Arthur half expected her to seek out the workshop anyway, but she didn’t: she simply reversed the path they had taken to get there in the first place, and was soon leading them back out onto the city streets. As they made their way back towards the concert venue, Brian began to slow his steps, putting a gap between himself and the Doctor. As soon as Arthur dared glance over his shoulder to see if anything was wrong, Brian reached out and set a hand on his shoulder, bringing both of them to a halt.

“Um…is something…wrong?” Arthur asked, feeling his voice break embarrassingly as he did so.

“That is what I want to know,” Brian said. “You’ve been acting quite suspiciously during this whole expedition.”

Arthur’s face burned, and he couldn’t meet Brian’s gaze. How had he let himself get into this position?

Suddenly, he felt two fingers underneath his chin, raising his face and turning it to look right into Brian’s own beautiful face. “If you aim to take Curt away from me, I will not let it pass easily,” he said, his voice stern and harsh, but then he smiled pleasantly. “However, if you were simply enjoying his company for a few hours, I have no problems with that.”

Arthur did his best to smile. “I—I’d never try to—I always—I love both of you—” He stopped suddenly, overcome with horror at what he had just said. It wasn’t that it was wrong, exactly, but he’d only meant he loved the beauty of their relationship!

But Brian smiled desirously. “Well, that’s delightful to hear,” he said, stroking Arthur’s cheek. “Perhaps we should all sit down and…discuss…that sometime.”

Was it really that easy? Arthur nodded, excited by the very idea that maybe Brian was interested in letting Arthur join both of them in bed. Even if it was only a one-time offer, how could he not be thrilled by the prospect?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I've seen something where someone said they view "No Entry" (or was it "Keep Out"?) signs as invitations. It *feels* like something the Doctor would say, but I can't remember if it was, in fact, the Doctor, or if it was someone else.


	9. Chapter 9

Ace had fetched up back on the stage, for no particular reason. Probably because no one was there. Every time she asked anyone about Brian’s wife, they automatically jumped to the conclusion either that she wanted the position herself, or that she was checking she’d be able to get away with committing adultery with him. Why did everyone seem to think that every girl who laid eyes on Brian wanted to sleep with him? He was nowhere near good-looking enough to make that assumption sensible, and his musical oeuvre was hardly likely to create excessive sexual desire, either. Was that simply what people were like in this part of history in this part of the galaxy, or had Brian just surrounded himself with sex-obsessed perverts? There didn’t really seem to be a good way to ask…

“You know, you’re not really allowed out here,” a man’s voice suddenly said. Sounded American. “Not that I give a shit.” Curt Wild walked out onto the stage. “You’ll get in trouble if anyone else finds you, though.”

Ace nodded, glancing out at the empty seating area. “Did he really think that stunt was going to work?” she asked, gesturing at the cordoned-off area of the catwalk to the side, where the gun had exploded.

“Yeah. I told him it wouldn’t, but Brian never listens to anyone.”

“Did he tell his wife about it in advance?” Ace asked, looking Curt right in the one eye that wasn’t hidden by his lengthy fringe. “Or at all?”

“Nah, they haven’t spoken since she went home.” Curt shrugged. “Mandy’s gotten distant lately.”

“Can’t be because her husband is having a public affair with another man,” Ace said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes.

“You’d think she’d be pissed about it, but she seemed fine for the first year,” Curt replied, shaking his head. “Not like she was sitting around waiting for him to change his mind or something; she probably fucked as many people in that year as I do in five or six.”

Ace cleared her throat uncomfortably. This was not a side of future lifestyles that she was used to learning about. She wasn’t entirely sure anyone had ever even _mentioned_ sex to her in the entire time so far that she had been travelling with _her_ Doctor. They didn’t usually swear, either… “Is that normal?” she asked. “Being so free with information about someone else’s sex life? Or is that your way of being catty?”

“Catty?” Curt repeated, eyebrows raised and a half smile on his lips. “That’s pretty fucking archaic.”

“Well, I am from pretty far in your past.”

“Fair enough.” Curt shrugged. “I don’t know how it is where you’re from, but the tour’s like a big family. No point in hiding things in a family—not when your family’s not fucking nuts like mine, anyway. I’d never tell an outsider anything about who Mandy sleeps with.”

Ace nodded. “Is she really visiting her family?”

Curt shrugged. “That’s what she told Brian she was doing. Why, you think she’s off with some other man?”

“I’m not sure I think anything specific on the subject,” Ace admitted. She couldn’t quite bring herself to admit that she was just asking around because the ambassador was suspicious of foul play. “I suppose I was just perplexed by her absence.”

“It’s not that weird. I think she just likes having some time to unwind without everyone watching her all the time.” He sighed. “Wouldn’t mind some of that myself.”

Ace nodded, but wasn’t sure what she should say in response. After a few minutes of silence, she finally asked “Do you know where the Doctor is?”

“She and Brian went to talk to President Reynolds,” Curt said. “Probably be back sometime tomorrow.” 

“I can’t see the Doctor waiting that long for _anything_. Especially not this Doctor. She seems even more impatient than mine.”

“That have something to do with what Arthur told me, about how the Doctor used to be an old man?” Curt asked.

Ace nodded. “She’s a Time Lord—Time Lady, now I suppose? Well, whatever you call it, they regenerate instead of dying. Get a whole new life with a new face. And a slightly altered personality. I’ve been travelling with her when she was younger, but looked older.”

“Huh. Must be weird to be married to one and have ‘em suddenly change like that.”

“I don’t think the Time Lords go in for love and marriage much. The Doctor—my version, that is—has mentioned his granddaughter to me before, but never a son or a daughter. I always assumed he adopted her when he was too old-looking to call himself her father, so he called himself her grandfather instead.”

“If they don’t like love, do they like sex?”

Ace shrugged. “The Doctor doesn’t seem to, from what little I can tell.” The only other Time Lord she had ever met was the Master, and she did _not_ want to know about it if he had any interest in love or sex.

Curt laughed. “Sucks for Brian, then. He was hoping to score there. How about you? You like it?”

“I’m…picky.” She smiled. “I’m all for it, but only with the right partner.”

“So he’s not gonna be able to score with you, either.”

“Nope.”

“Fine by me.” Curt smiled, a little shyly. “I’m sharing him with too many people already.”

The sentiment would have seemed sweet, if Ace hadn’t seen the way Curt reacted to the unabashed desire in Arthur’s staring. “How many people is he sharing _you_ with?”

“Not nearly as many. I’m not into chicks, so that cuts my options in half right there.” He frowned. “Not really into aliens, either. But Brian’ll fuck almost anything.”

“Right, this is getting into creepy territory, so I’m going to go look for the Doctor now.” Anything was better than the imagery Curt’s last statement was evoking…

“It’s pointless, but do what you want. The residence is over on the other side of the monument.”

Ace started to leave, then paused, and turned back to him. “What’s the story behind that monument?” she asked. “Did the original settlers really feel so guilty about committing genocide that they built a monument to their own victims?”

Curt shrugged. “Seems that way. The official story is that they got wiped out by some natural disaster or plague or something, and the colonists couldn’t save them, but no one seriously believes it anymore. The first ship probably just butchered them all, and then made up that sob story to tell the rest of the ships when they got here.”

“Sometimes the human race is truly appalling,” Ace said, grimacing and imagining the kinds of ‘monuments’ they would have built in America if the colonists had somehow managed to wipe out all the Indians. Probably would have built statues with six arms based on old Hindu art…

“Yeah. See, that’s why Brian wants us to take over, you know?” Curt said, with such an unaffected smile that Ace couldn’t help feeling that he was truly on the level. “We would put a stop to all that shit. It was probably a pipe dream all along, but…”

“Any dream that involves putting a stop to slaughter is a good one,” Ace said, smiling back at him.

***

The ambassador sent a live messenger around first thing the next morning, telling the Doctor when the peace talks would be held, and requesting her assistance. The Doctor was uncharacteristically silent for almost a minute after the messenger explained why he was there. “The thing is, I’d been hoping to look into the source of the communications interference during the peace talks,” the Doctor eventually said.

“The ambassador insists he won’t go unless you’re with him.”

The Doctor sighed, and looked over at Ace. “Let’s see if we can convince him to change his mind.”

“Might as well.” Ace got up off the sofa and tucked the guidebook into the pocket of her trousers. Given the way things usually went when the Doctor was involved, peace talks might end up with them running through countless side streets to escape some horrible monster, robot or cyborg bent on killing them in some ghastly way. Better to have a map so they’ll be able to get back again.

The Doctor seemed blithely certain that she would be able to convince the ambassador to change his mind, or so she said repeatedly on the walk to the embassy, but it only took five minutes to establish that no, his mind was absolutely dead set, and nothing was changing it short of a lobotomy. Uncomfortably, the Doctor handed over her ‘sonic’ to Ace, and leaned in close. “As soon as the peace talks are starting, you search this place for the source of the interference. If someone’s trying to start a war, their attention will be focused on the peace talks, and they’ll get lax here,” she whispered, then stepped back again. “We’ll be back in, what, an hour or so?”

“That’s quite over-optimistic,” the ambassador said. “The talks are scheduled to begin in one hour…and I would be surprised if they took less than five or six. President Reynolds is notoriously stubborn.”

“Ah.” For once, the Doctor had no retort, and just accepted his word, following him out of the office and leaving Ace to wait for an hour with nothing to do.

***

“When are the peace talks supposed to take place?” Brian asked, as he came back from the loo.

Arthur hoped Brian was addressing him, since Curt seemed to still be asleep. Chances seemed high enough that he thought it would be okay to answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometime this morning, wasn’t it?”

Brian frowned. “I want to be there, or at least have legal representation. If I’m not, they may try to shift all the blame onto me.”

It was a struggle, but Arthur managed not to remind him that everything really was his fault. He also somehow managed not to mention that Brian really should have said that yesterday, when they were in the president’s office. “Do you want me to call someone and ask?”

“Yes.”

Carefully, Arthur wriggled his way out from under Curt’s arm, slipped out of the bed, and hastily put his trousers back on. As he made his way to the video screen in the next room, he also put on a shirt, though he was pretty sure it was actually Brian’s. Probably didn’t matter: all that mattered was that he wasn’t going to be shirtless when he talked to some stuffy embassy staff. The call was quickly placed, and a woman in her seventies or so answered it. “Um, I’m with—I work for Brian Slade,” Arthur said, “and he was wondering when the peace negotiations between the ambassador and President Reynolds will be.”

“They’ll be starting in about half an hour, dearie.”

“Where are they? Mr. Slade wanted to attend, since the matter pertains directly to him.”

The old woman shook her head. “They’re at President Reynolds’ residence, but he’ll never allow Mr. Slade in. The ambassador said he wasn’t allowed to bring any Xeno 10 citizens with him.”

Arthur bit his lip a moment. “Perhaps Mr. Wild could attend, as a Xeno 3 citizen?”

“If Mrs. Slade were handy, _she_ might be allowed in, but Mr. Wild has a criminal record. He’ll never be allowed into an official meeting.”

“Oh. I see. Um…thank you?”

The old woman told him he was perfectly welcome, then closed her end of the call. Dejectedly, Arthur returned to the bedroom, and explained to Brian and Curt—who was now at least half awake, sitting up groggily as Brian fondled his hair—what she had told him.

“There’s no possible way Mandy could get here in half an hour,” Brian sighed. “I doubt we could even get through to her that quickly. She’s probably getting ready to go to bed about now.”

“You gonna just trust to fate?” Curt asked.

“I don’t like that option much.”

“Maybe I could go,” Arthur said. “I don’t think anyone ever officially confirmed to the president that I’m from Xeno 10. I know the accent’s a dead give-away, but the Doctor and Ace don’t sound so different from me, and they’re from…I don’t even know _where_ they’re from. Ace claims to be from Earth, but that has to be impossible.” The Doctor had mentioned someplace called Gallifrey, but Arthur wasn’t sure if that was a planet or a space station, or if she was from there originally or simply lived there.

“I knew we were right to bring you aboard,” Brian said, smiling as he gestured Arthur closer. “Such a clever boy.” He gave Arthur a brief kiss. “Hurry along, or they might start without you. We’ll send the Doctor to join you.”

Arthur smiled brightly. Curt squeezed his hand warmly, then Arthur dashed out of the room. While he was in the lift, he ran his fingers through his hair to try and make it look at least a little respectable. Of course, he still looked a mess: he hadn’t shaved (though he barely needed to, really), his clothes were all rumpled and Brian’s shirt was a tiny bit tight on him as well as being a little bit short. It was a thrill to be going out in public wearing something that actually belonged to Brian Slade, though! Would have been more of a thrill if he’d put on Curt’s trousers instead of his own, but…maybe next time…

Not far from the concert venue, Arthur had to turn onto a major street, and he had hardly done so when he heard a familiar voice prattling away about some other peace conference. “I almost felt sorry for the Marqués de Labrador, really. Kept demanding Louisiana back, even though there wasn’t an American representative in Vienna at the time!”

Arthur followed the sound of the voice, and found the Doctor walking along beside the ambassador, who looked rather perplexed. “Oh, you’re already here?” Arthur said.

“Hullo, what’s brought you out?” the Doctor asked him.

“Um, Brian wanted to make sure there was someone at the peace conference to represent his interests.” As he saw the ambassador start to object, he quickly explained his plan for pretending to be from some other planet.

“Probably easier to say you’re my assistant, and I need you with me,” the Doctor said.

Arthur shrugged. “If that works, that’s fine, too.”

The ambassador sighed. “I can’t imagine Reynolds liking—or agreeing—to that.”

“It’ll be fine,” the Doctor insisted, before continuing with her story. From what little Arthur was able to piece together, she was telling them about the time she had helped with the negotiations following the defeat of someone named Napoleon, who had evidently conquered most of a galaxy, and after his defeat the representatives of all the planets he had attacked gathered on some planet called Vienna, which was evidently in galactic sector 1814? There were so many unfamiliar names and words, and the Doctor always spoke so quickly, so he was utterly unable to follow the thread of the story, except that there was some kind of unpleasant alien masquerading as a Zar (whatever that was) and causing all sorts of extra havoc.

The Doctor’s story may have been almost over—or it may have had another hour or so left in it—by the time they reached the presidential residence, but thankfully she let it drop with a “we can finish the story later.” Which even the ambassador didn’t want.

This time, the robot guard on the door let them in without a word, and they were met by a very official-looking man in a smart suit. He led them directly to the president’s office, and announced only the ambassador before opening the door. True to his word, President Reynolds had a whole group of his soldiers with him—there were about fifteen of them gathered along the back wall—and he looked over the new arrivals grimly. “I told you that you couldn’t bring any of your people with you,” he said, glaring narrowly at the ambassador.

“The Doctor is not one of my people,” the ambassador replied without hesitation.

“But that boy is,” Reynolds countered, pointing at Arthur.

“He’s my assistant, and I need him,” the Doctor said. “Consult your records again. I always travel with at least one companion to aid me.”

Reynolds frowned, and looked at a small tablet resting on his desk, scanning through the contents listed on it. “All right, I suppose he can stay.” He shook his head. “Let’s just get this shit over with.”

As they got down to business, Arthur leaned against the wall next to the door and braced himself for a very long, very boring experience…

***

In the time between being left at the embassy and when the talks were supposed to start, Ace explored the embassy enough to locate all the spots of interest. Of highest interest, given why she was there, was the security and communications centre, in the basement of the building. It was off limits to all but high clearance personnel—and cleaning and repair staff, obviously—but she had been able to talk her way in without much difficulty. The room contained the typical paraphernalia: rows of monitors and control panels, a couple of chairs, and one bored security guard. A little flattery and a bit of a smile got the guard talking and talking and talking and talking…

“They’re all mad here, of course,” he told her, after spending about ten minutes gossiping about who among the staff was cheating on their significant other with whom. “Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you the building is haunted. As if that was possible!”

“Haunted?” Ace repeated. “What, did they bring in ghosts in all that antique furniture in the ambassador’s office?” she asked, with a laugh.

“Nah, the ghosts—alleged ghosts—are the reason for the antique furniture.” The guard shook his head. “Doors are always sliding open and shut without anyone telling them to, automatic furniture moves without being given commands, messages get lost or are sent without a sender…stuff like that. I was told all about it when I got the job, and my first thought—and I’m sure it’s your first thought, too—was that it was just faulty wiring. It’s the easiest thing in the world for a little bit of current to go to the wrong place at the wrong time if there’s a problem with the wiring. But the man who hired me insisted it was ghosts. That no amount of checking the wiring ever found a fault. Said the building was built on an ancient centaur graveyard.”

Ace had to laugh. She’d heard about places in America that claimed to be horribly haunted because they’d been built on old Indian graveyards. Who knew that kind of stupidity would last this long? “Have you checked the wiring yourself?” she asked.

“I’m never allowed,” the guard sighed. “Don’t have the right clearance; I’m just a guard, not a repair tech. The techs tell me they check all the wiring in the building on a rotating schedule, each room’s wiring in turn, like clockwork, and they never find anything.”

Ace nodded, and the guard changed the subject after a moment, going into more gossip, this time about the incompetence of the repair techs. But she couldn’t quite get past those scheduled wire checks. If someone was actively interfering with the building to make it appear haunted—or at least causing the problems that had people thinking it was haunted, no matter their intentions in causing them—then all they’d have to do would be to access the schedule and know when they have to remove anything that would seem suspicious on the night before the check. If they could send false messages and intercept the real ones, then they could surely access the schedule for the maintenance crew…

By the time the peace talks were about to start, Ace was getting a little antsy. How was she supposed to rid herself of this overly chatty guard? He would never let her inspect the room for signs of how the interference was caused, and she was sure this was the room she needed to check first…

While she was pondering the problem, Ace got the Doctor’s sonic device out of her pocket and started examining it. It had a button, but she didn’t see any other controls on it, and the only read-out panel on it was so small that she couldn’t imagine it was able to impart much information. Maybe like so much else that this new version of the Doctor used, it was at least partially psychic? That was more than a little disquieting, really. Ace didn’t want to use an object that worked because it was reading her mind to find out what it needed to do.

“What’s that?” the guard asked.

“Something belonging to my friend the Doctor,” Ace told him.

“What is it, a bit of jewellery?”

“No, it’s a device.” Sure, it was silver-coloured and had a crystal at the end, but why would jewellery be the first thing he thought it was? It was awfully clunky and quite lacking in ways to attach it to one’s body…

“What does it do? How does it work?”

Ace shrugged. “Other than by pushing this button, I don’t know. And it seems to do a little bit of everything.”

“Here, let me see it,” the guard said, holding out his hand. “I’m sure I can figure it out for you.”

Ace wanted to wallop him for being so patronising, but that would only hamper her investigation, so she put that notion on the back burner, and duly handed over the sonic. The man turned it over and over in his hands, peering down at it in what he probably thought was a very clever-looking way, but which really made him look rather like a monkey at the zoo. Only not as cute.

Eventually, the guard pressed the button on the sonic, and its crystal end lit up. Moments later, one of the control panels on the opposite side of the room caught fire. The guard swore, throwing down the device, and grabbed a large device off the wall. As it spewed foam at the burning machinery, Ace realised it was a high-tech fire extinguisher. It left the machine coated in a hard, white, Styrofoam-like substance.

The guard sighed as he put the extinguisher back on the wall. “It’ll take me hours to chisel all that off,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d better get my tool kit from the—” He didn’t have a chance to finish his thought before sprinklers started gushing water, dowsing everything in the room. The guard swore very creatively. “I have to go to the shut-off on the other side of the basement,” he told her, “and half the staff will be coming down here to complain about the sprinklers going off. You’d better be gone before they get here!” As he left the room, Ace could see that the sprinklers were going out in the hall, too.

Determined not to waste the opportunity, Ace quickly scooped up the sonic off the floor and returned it to her pocket. None of the consoles seemed to be working properly under the deluge coming from the ceiling (no surprise there!) but she remembered which one had appeared to be the communications array, and got down on the floor, crawling under the desk to see what she could find out about its wiring. There was an access panel just in front of her, so Ace pulled out a pocket knife and prized the cover off the panel. Cold, musty air wafted out, and the darkness seemed to go on forever.

Emerging from under the console again, Ace checked the room briefly and found a small tool kit in the supplies closet on the wall. The tool kit contained—among other things—a torch, so she took the whole kit, keeping the torch in hand as she returned to the panel. Shining the torch through the panel’s opening revealed a passage bigger than most of the ducts she had seen in her time with the Doctor, but not by very much. It was well big enough for her, at any rate, so Ace climbed on in, and pulled the panel back loosely into place behind her. Hopefully, no one would do more than glance under the console; she might be in trouble if anyone spotted the loose panel and fastened it back into place.

Looking around to get her bearing, Ace realised it wasn’t so much a duct as an access tunnel, or possibly something to do with a system of geothermal heating and cooling. (She wasn’t entirely sure what geothermal heating and cooling consisted of, as the Doctor had merely mentioned it in passing once, in describing a particular alien planet’s architecture, but this seemed to fit with what little he had said about it.) Whatever the purpose of it, the tunnel was only a few feet wide, but went all the way up to the ground level, and it appeared to have been hewn directly from the bedrock. Ace could also see the wiring that passed from the various computer banks inside the guard station, and where the wires wended their way up into the rest of the embassy…but she could also see a bundle of wires heading away from the embassy.

Following those wires, Ace soon came to a stone wall blocking her way. It looked to be solid, natural stone, part of the bedrock from which the basement had been carved. The wires plunged right into it with no sign of a proper opening, as if they had grown out of the stone like vines.

“How’s that possible?” she mused, tugging slightly on the wires. They gave with surprising ease. Running her hand along their length towards the wall, Ace was surprised to see her hand pass right into the stone along with the wires. Stepping forward, she laughed as she passed through the wall just like the wires had. “A holographic projection?” Ace sighed, and shook her head. “Oldest trick in the book. Can’t believe no one found it before…”

Ace continued to follow the wires away from the embassy. The further away she got, the more the area opened up around her, until she was inside a massive cavern, in which the only sounds were her footsteps and the occasional drip of water. She had been walking for about ten minutes, maybe more, when she started to hear what seemed to be running water as well.

Curiously, Ace got the guide book out of her pocket, thinking she would look at the map and see if she could piece together where she was. Surprisingly, whatever system it used to detect her location still worked down in those caves, and it showed that she had walked about two-thirds of the distance from the Xeno 10 embassy to the Monument. She didn’t see any rivers on the map, though. It must have been an entirely underground stream. As she set out walking again, Ace decided that if the source of the wires wasn’t near the water, she’d go search it out before returning to the surface. It would be a shame to miss out on something so cool as an underground river on an alien planet!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And in this chapter we have the sole instance of the Doctor talking about a past adventure that is not drawn from the show. There have been no television episodes set at the Congress of Vienna, and if there are any Big Finish Audio dramas and/or novels set then, I'm unaware of them. But it would be a great setting, and Alexander I's behavior was erratic enough that it wouldn't require too much mutilation of history to claim that part of that behavior was actually a Zygon (or some other shape-shifting alien). I'm thinking the eighth Doctor would probably be the one who would fare best in that setting, personally. (If anyone wants to write a fic about a Zygon (or whatever) impersonating the Czar at the Congress of Vienna, please go for it. Just let me know about it when you post it, okay?) Anyway, I should probably apologize for the overdose of 19th century history in this fic as a whole; I wrote it last summer, having just finished the final course of my Master's Degree, which was a course on Europe in the 19th century. Hence this, and all the references to the Franco-Prussian war earlier on. And probably a lot of other small references that are slipping my mind at the moment.


	10. Chapter 10

Arthur quickly lost track of time as the peace negotiations got underway. Despite what they had feared, it didn’t look like President Reynolds really planned on blaming Brian for _anything_. He didn’t even seem to care about the chaos that had been caused by the fake assassination attempt. Mostly, he seemed intent on levying new and oppressive taxes on anything and everything that had anything to do with Xeno 10. No matter how much the ambassador complained that the tariffs were going to completely stifle both economies, Reynolds was implacable in his desire to wring extra money out of Xeno 10 merchants and manufacturers. If he’d been reading a summary of it, Arthur might have found it interesting—as a character study in sheer stubborn stupidity, if nothing else—but witnessing it first hand was mind-numbingly boring. Even the Doctor was clearly bored, and seemed much more interested in a yoyo she had found in her pocket than in what was going on around the negotiating table.

Nothing happened to break the tedium until one of the flat-faced robots came in with a tray of drinks, which it tried to serve to the ambassador. “What are you doing here?!” the president demanded, swatting the drinks to the floor. “I didn’t send for you! This is a secure meeting—no fucking robots allowed!”

For just a moment, the face displayed on the robot’s screen changed from it usual, mild and genial one to something dark, inhuman and enraged. The president and the ambassador didn’t seem to notice, and Arthur would have thought he had imagined it if the Doctor hadn’t suddenly snapped to attention, the toy in her hand forgotten. As soon as the robot left, the Doctor headed after it, whispering “You stay here and keep watch on the proceedings,” to Arthur as she passed.

That command held for maybe three seconds, then Arthur was creeping out after her. No way he was going to stay there and be stupefied by that rubbish when he could help the Doctor figure out the mystery of what was going on with those creepy robots! He caught up with her almost immediately, and she didn’t say a word to chastise him for leaving his post.

They followed the robot down to a room labelled “Storage,” which evidently meant _robot_ storage, since there was nothing else in there but dozens of those flat-faced things. As soon as the robot entered the room, it went to its charging station, plugged itself in, and suspended its functions, just like all the others.

The Doctor frowned at the robots, and tapped her foot impatiently. “If I’d known this was going to be how it would turn out, I wouldn’t have left my sonic with Ace,” she sighed.

“What about the diagnostic machine?” Arthur suggested, pointing at the device near the door. “Won’t that tell you anything?”

“Possibly.” The Doctor quickly began running the diagnostic program for all the robots, but if there was anything significant in the readouts scrolling by so quickly on the screen, Arthur was completely unable to see it. Eventually, she turned the machine off again. “It looks as though they’re getting commands from an outside source, but no one’s able to pinpoint the location of the source, or how the commands reach the robots.” She frowned. “If I only had my sonic, I could follow the signals!”

“That’s assuming there _are_ signals to follow,” Arthur pointed out. “Didn’t you say they’d applied all sorts of new circuits to the robots to block incoming signals?”

“Yes, that’s—of course!” The Doctor suddenly dashed over to the robot they had followed, and began investigating its charging station. “If something is tampering and feeding them new code along with their electricity…” A few quick yanks on the robot, and it was sprawled on the floor. The Doctor winced. “Sorry. Just trying to move you out of the way. Nothing personal!” She began running her fingers along the electrodes that connected to the robot’s head. “Ooh, yes, just there! That’s definitely a different kind of energy! Here, feel for yourself,” she added, gesturing Arthur over.

“What do you mean, a different kind of energy?”

“Electricity that’s been generated by a different means.”

“You can’t _feel_ the difference between different methods of electricity generation!”

“ _I_ can,” the Doctor insisted. “Xeno 3 typically uses a combination of solar panel and anti-matter generation, like most human civilisations of your era. But this is different. Older. Mustier.” She ran her fingers over the electrode again, and licked her lips briefly, as if she was actually _tasting_ the electricity. “It’s hydraulically generated, I’d say. Probably underground.”

“Um…”

“There must be access somewhere…” Without saying another word, the Doctor left the room again, and Arthur had no choice but to hurry after her. When he caught up to her, she was interrogating a Xeno 3 soldier. “There’s a cave system under this residence, isn’t there?” she was asking in a surprisingly firm tone.

“That’s entirely classified information,” the soldier insisted.

“It’s a matter of planetary security,” the Doctor replied. “If I can’t get under this house, you’ll continue to have robots running amok and serving poison to the president’s guests. And it’ll all be your fault. Is that what you want?”

The soldier blanched, and shook his head. “There’s an escape tunnel to the caves underneath the laundry facilities,” he said uncomfortably, “but if you ever tell anyone that I’m the one who mentioned it—” He didn’t even have time to finish, because the Doctor was already off and running.

Arthur ran after her. “That robot wasn’t really trying to poison the ambassador, was it?” he asked.

“Probably. It did smell off, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t smell anything.” It had been a glass of water on the other side of the room! How could _anyone_ have smelled anything?

When they reached the laundry room, the Doctor went right on in, and was soon tossing aside laundry bins and drying racks and everything else until she found the well-camouflaged escape tunnel. Even though she complained about trying to open it without her sonic, she had it open in less than a minute, and was soon charging on into the cave system, leaving Arthur to continue trailing helplessly after her.

They hadn’t gone far into the cave system before the Doctor stopped and looked around. The caves were vast, and Arthur could hear running water somewhere in the distance. The place was dimly lit, probably by some kind of bio-luminescent fungus, since the ceiling and floor both seemed to emit a faint glow. Aside from the thick, rough brick walls that were the basement level of the president’s residence, Arthur didn’t see anything in the cave other than some stalactites and stalagmites.

“Ah, here we are,” the Doctor said, stooping nearby. “Looks like our saboteur really wasn’t using signals transmitted through the air; here are some old-fashioned cables running over towards the robot charging stations.”

Indeed, there on the ground were some thick black cables, easily made out against the lightly glowing cave floor. “That’s some really old tech,” Arthur commented. “I haven’t seen cables like that outside of a museum.”

“They’re probably having to cannibalise old equipment to run this operation, whatever it is,” the Doctor said, standing again. “Well, let’s go. If we follow these cables into the cave, we’ll find our culprit.”

“Is that safe?” Arthur asked. “If they’re trying to start a war, they might be dangerous.”

“That’s all the more reason we have to go.”

“Um…” Arthur was quite positive something was broken about that logic, but he couldn’t put in words precisely what it was…

***

As it turned out, Ace found the underground river well before she found the source of the wires. The bundle of wires had long since begun curving around stalagmites, giving their placement some stability, but they were still headed more or less in one uniform direction until they reached the river. Then they turned sharply, using a particularly large stalagmite to effect the shift in direction.

Ace had been following the side of the river for about five minutes before she became aware of another sound on top of that of running water. It seemed to be a low whirring, like of machinery, and something about it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Not for the first time, she found herself wishing the Doctor hadn’t demanded that she leave behind all her Nitro-9 on the TARDIS when he dropped her off on this planet. She was on her way to encounter a being who was actively trying to foment a war, and yet she was all alone and unarmed? Hardly ideal. Sounded like a good way to get herself killed, in fact. _Hopefully_ she wasn’t about to die—the future Doctor had certainly claimed she would safely board the TARDIS again in about a day’s time—but there were so many ways that it could go wrong that Ace couldn’t quite believe she was _really_ safe.

Just as Ace came across another set of wires joining the ones she had been following, she became aware of footsteps and voices coming from the same direction as the new wires. She hid behind a stalagmite—not that there was all that much visibility down here, despite the bio-luminescence all around her—just in case it was some of the warmongers, but she came out again almost immediately, recognising the voice of the Doctor, cheerily prattling something about…ancient Greek mythology?

Ace turned away from the river, following the sound of the Doctor’s voice, and was soon approaching the Doctor and Arthur, walking towards the river. “Oi, Doctor, what are you doing here?” she called out, once they were close enough to see each other. “I thought you were at the peace conference.”

“Ace!” The Doctor smiled widely, and ran over to her. “Does this cave go all the way to the embassy?”

“Yeah. But what happened with the conference?”

“Oh, nothing much,” the Doctor said, making Arthur grimace. “Any idea who’s on the other end of these cables?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, let’s get moving, then!” The Doctor started walking again, at a fast clip, forcing both Ace and Arthur to hurry after her. Well, that was typical of the Doctor, no matter what face (s)he was wearing…

They didn’t have to follow the wires much longer before the wires turned again, crossing a bridge over the river. It wasn’t a natural bridge, either; it was carefully constructed from stone, with the remains of elaborate carvings. The style didn’t seem familiar to Ace at all, though.

“This looks ancient,” Ace commented, tracing a finger across the eroded carvings. “Like it’s been down here for centuries.”

“Probably millennia,” the Doctor agreed.

“It can’t be _that_ old,” Arthur insisted. “Xeno 3 was only colonised seven or eight hundred years ago.”

“Could it be left over from the indigenous inhabitants?” Ace asked, aiming the question at the Doctor.

“The centaurs were supposed to have been total primitives,” Arthur said, ignoring (or ignorant of) the fact that she hadn’t been asking him. “All the history books show the settlers arriving to a planet that only contained grass huts.”

“What they built above ground and what they built below ground was not necessarily at the same level,” the Doctor said, shaking her head.

“And those same books probably showed them looking like the statue in the Monument,” Ace pointed out. “No way they actually looked like that.”

“It does seem improbable,” the Doctor agreed, “but stranger things have happened.”

Ace sighed. “Like how half the alien races in the universe seem to look exactly like humans?”

“Yes, like the way humans and so many other races look so much like Gallifreyans.”

Honestly, Ace had been somewhat hoping for a pseudoscientific response about ‘seeding’ or something. The idea of passing that off as mere coincidence felt dismissive…

“Is the bridge safe to walk on?” Arthur asked. “It looks like it might collapse.”

“I think it’s pretty stable,” the Doctor said. “We can cross one at a time, if you’re worried.” She shrugged. “I doubt the water’s very deep, anyway. We could probably ford it without any problem, even if the bridge does collapse.”

“It’s also probably freezing cold, and who knows what might be in it,” Ace interjected. Had the Doctor forgotten that story _her_ Doctor had once told about some idiot he used to travel with who nearly drank out of an acid pool because he didn’t notice it was disintegrating his tie?

The Doctor just shrugged, and crossed the bridge. A few pebbles skittered down from the underside and hit the water’s surface with barely a splash, but the bridge itself remained stable. Hoping it would remain so for her, too—and hoping to get across before Arthur, who probably weighed much more than either her or the Doctor, given his sheer height—Ace followed her at a very brisk walk. Again, a couple of loose pieces dislodged, but the bridge remained intact.

Arthur seemed to be hesitating on the other side, watching them. “Come on, then,” the Doctor called over to him. “It’s perfectly safe!”

“You don’t want us to leave you there, do you?” Ace added. “We may not have a lot of time before they try something else, so we can’t afford to just wait.”

Arthur nodded, biting his lip, then dashed across the bridge at a sprint. More significant stones dislodged from the bottom of the bridge—probably from the heavier footfalls caused by running—but it still remained standing. The Doctor chided him for running, and they were soon walking again, following the wires towards a large object that crouched over a bend in the underground river just a little further ahead.

The object was oblong and rounded, about the height of the TARDIS, but twice as wide and four times as deep (or vice-versa, depending on which side was the front). The object, whatever it was, was both the source of the wires and the source of the whirring sound. There didn’t seem to be any doors to get inside, however.

As they drew closer still, the cave suddenly became much brighter, allowing Ace to see that the object looked to have been carved from stone. “Why did it get so much lighter?” Ace asked the Doctor quietly.

“Proximity sensor, I’d imagine,” the Doctor said, crouching down and poking at the fungi creating the light. “It’s biological, but this is definitely engineered, or at least very selectively bred.”

“What’s making that sound?” Arthur asked. “Just the water running under that thing?”

“It sounds like machinery running,” Ace said. “Probably powered by a waterwheel inside, right?”

“Something like it,” the Doctor agreed. “The question is, what is it, and who’s controlling it?” She stepped up to the object, and placed a hand on its surface. “Oh, feel it humming!” she exclaimed, even as a screen raised up out of the top.

“Who defiles our holy presence?” a voice demanded, as an image appeared on the screen. It was the image of a face, but neither a human one nor one that even slightly resembled any alien Ace had ever seen. It had five eyes, which appeared to be compound eyes, arranged around a vertical mouth.

“Well!” The Doctor stepped away from the object to get a better look up at the screen. “You’re quite something! Is this whole thing your memory bank?”

The face on the screen regarded her passively for a moment. “That is the simplest way to define our existence,” it said. “You are different from the human murderers,” it added. “You have a double pulmonary system.”

“That’s right,” the Doctor agreed, nodding. “I’m a Time Lord, from Gallifrey.”

“Your words mean nothing to us.”

“Were you built by the indigenous life forms on this planet?” Ace asked, moving up beside the Doctor. “Before the colonists killed them?”

“We were their guiding light for centuries,” the computer agreed. “Before the humans murdered them all.”

“All the histories claim the colonists tried to save them,” Arthur added, a bit timidly.

“Lies! We watched helplessly as the humans injected poison into their blood!”

“Poison…?” Arthur repeated, his face draining of colour.

“Can you show us?” the Doctor asked. “You must have video files in your memory banks somewhere, yes?”

“We did not have visual access to the surface,” the computer replied. “We only knew what our priests told us. We shall show you…” The face on the screen faded out, and was replaced with video footage of an alien being approaching, presumably recorded by a camera _in_ the video screen. The alien was like nothing Ace had ever seen, but she could easily see why the human settlers had nicknamed them centaurs: it had four legs on an elongated body, and a long neck, from which arm-like tentacles grew. The lighting wasn’t great in the video, but Ace suspected they were more or less insectoid, or possibly amphibians.

The alien on the screen tumbled to the ground near the computer. Now that it was so close up, Ace could see pustules all over its body, seeping something green. “The invaders are killing us,” the alien croaked. “They said they would cure this condition, but they’re murdering us instead! Everyone who accepts their aid dies within hours! Save us, great Pjalsoom! Rid us of these alien butchers!” It had barely finished speaking when the alien collapsed entirely, appearing dead.

The video ended, and the face reappeared on the video screen. “It has taken many long centuries, but we are ready to avenge our people at last.”

Ace bit her lip. “Um, look…maybe the humans really were trying to help?” she suggested. “If they didn’t understand the biology of the race that built you, medicine that would cure humans might have been poisonous to your people.”

“It was intentional,” the computer insisted.

“We can find out one way or the other,” the Doctor said. “We do have a time machine at our disposal, after all. No matter what happened centuries ago, the humans living here now aren’t responsible. I won’t let you kill them with this war you’re trying to start.”

“They are the products of murderers. They should not exist.”

“No one should be punished for what their parents did. And in this case, you’re talking about dozens of generations. Not to mention all the innocent beings of many races—human and non-human like—who moved to this solar system in the intervening centuries. They don’t deserve to die.”

“Our people did not deserve to die, either.”

“That’s true, but you can’t punish innocent people for it!” Ace exclaimed. “We won’t let you.”

“You cannot stop us.”

“Actually, there are dozens of ways we could stop you quite easily,” the Doctor said, with a smile, “but I don’t want to have to use them. You weren’t designed for this, surely. Wouldn’t you rather go back to your intended purpose?”

“Without our people, we have no purpose.”

“Well, what _was_ your original purpose?” Ace asked.

“We aided in managing crop rotation and storage, and developed new dance steps,” the computer replied.

“Dance steps?” Arthur repeated. “Wouldn’t they have rather developed those themselves?”

“It is very difficult with so many limbs to keep track of,” the computer replied, almost snootily. “Elder Lvggwx had as many as fifteen pairs of feet. Coordinating between a dozen partners of different generations required all our processing skill.”

“Wow, I’d love to meet the Lvggwx,” the Doctor commented. “They sound fascinating.”

Or like giant centipedes, Ace thought.

“You cannot meet them,” the computer replied. “The humans murdered them.”

“I told you, I’ve got a time ship. I can meet them any time I want.” The Doctor paused, nodding to herself. “Let’s make a deal, all right?”

“We are listening.”

“I’ll go back and find out what happened when the humans arrived on this planet, see for myself whether they purposefully wiped out your people, or did it by accident. I’ll record video of it, bring that back here, and then we can talk about you not killing the modern humans.”

“We must avenge our people.”

The Doctor sighed. “If you still feel that way after I’ve brought you an accurate report of what happened on the surface…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But in the meantime, no more trying to start wars!”

The computer was silent for just long enough that Ace started fidgeting, wondering if they should just blow it up. Not that she had anything on her to blow it up _with_.

“How long are you asking us to wait?” the computer asked.

“It’ll take us at least an hour to get back to my ship, so…how about two?” The Doctor smiled. “You can wait that long, surely, since you’ve waited centuries already.”

“The humans will not have reached any resolutions in two hours. We can wait that long, but no longer.”

“Right then, let’s get going!” the Doctor exclaimed, turning to Ace and Arthur. “We need to get back to the TARDIS as fast as possible! Lots to do!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I am terrible at names. Particularly names that aren't supposed to come from any (real) linguistic tradition. Since I'd gotten my hands on a dice coin with the alphabet on it, I decided to use it to name the computer and the alien race. The result was wonderfully and appropriately Adams-esque for the computer...and utterly awful for the race. But I went ahead and used it anyway because at least it certainly sounds alien!


	11. Chapter 11

Though Arthur followed the Doctor and Ace back up through the presidential residence and to the Doctor’s ship, where it was still haphazardly parked in an alleyway, he hesitated just outside the ship. Did he really have a right to go with them? For that matter, was the Doctor _really_ able to travel through time in her crazy box, or had that just been a lie to get out of that cave without the computer trying to attack them?

“Don’t hover,” the Doctor suddenly told him. “Either come in or stay out, but either way shut the door or we can’t take off.”

Uneasily, Arthur stepped inside, closing the door behind him. If they really _could_ travel in time…well, he didn’t want to think Curt’s ancestors were murderers. Curt and Brian would both probably prefer being able to feel certain of that.

“Do you know exactly when the first colonists arrived on this planet?” the Doctor asked, looking at him.

“Um…no, not beyond that it was a bit over seven hundred and fifty years ago,” Arthur replied.

“That’s no good.” The Doctor frowned, and began fidgeting with odd-looking controls on the console. “Maybe some galactic history texts have more precise data…”

Ace suddenly pulled something out of her pocket, and began examining it. Moving closer, Arthur could see it was a tourist’s guidebook. “Here, this has it!” Ace said, showing it to the Doctor. “Exact date.”

“Perfect! We may have to hover above the planet for most of the day, but we’ll see them arrive,” the Doctor promised, then pulled a large lever, and set the ship to groaning and wheezing.

“We’re just going to hang out in space?” Ace asked. “Won’t that interfere with events? If the colony ship sees us…”

“We’ll be cloaked, but maybe we should land on the nearer moon, just to be sure,” the Doctor agreed.

“Cloaked?” Ace repeated. “Since when can the TARDIS put up a cloaking shield like in the movies?”

“Since always! It’s just a terrible power drain, so I usually don’t do it. Had to, that time I landed in the Oval Office, but usually…”

“The Oval Office?” Ace laughed. “When was that?”

“1969. Long story. Very complicated. Probably shouldn’t tell you, since it’s several regenerations after your time.”

“If _I_ was going to 1969, I wouldn’t want to go to the White House,” Ace said, shaking her head. “I’d want to go to the moon, already be there when Apollo 11 landed.”

“And take away Neil Armstrong’s glory?”

“Oh…well…I didn’t mean quite like that…”

They continued their conversation for some time, their meaning utterly hidden behind perpetual references to more and more obscure names, places and events that no one would ever be able to remember. Even after they arrived at their destination and the Doctor set a monitor up to watch the planet, they kept talking about things Arthur couldn’t begin to understand. He passed the time wondering what Curt was doing, and if he would ever invite Arthur to share another night with him, and whether or not Brian would also be involved. As much as Arthur had enjoyed last night, he found himself preferring the idea of just being with Curt, rather than with both of them. After all, Brian had so many other lovers—not to mention a wife!—so surely Curt would sometimes have nights alone to share with Arthur?

From there, his thoughts drifted to the Flaming Creatures, and wondering if they were going to be cross with him for ditching them, but it was hard to imagine that any of _them_ would have passed up a chance to sleep with both Curt and Brian at once, so surely they wouldn’t hold a grudge that Arthur had leapt at the opportunity? Unfortunately, he wasn’t entirely sure it worked that way. Really, he had probably gotten in a bit over his head; maybe this was too much too soon for someone who had been forced to hide himself away all his life. But sometimes you just had to jump into the deep end of the pool and hope you could figure out how to swim before you drowned…

By the time the Doctor let out a triumphant cry, Arthur’s thoughts had utterly run away with him, fantasizing about a perfect life lived out with Curt and Brian, always with them, always sharing their lives and love. He had completely lost track of how long he had been imagining it—some of it may have been a literal dream rather than just a fantasy, in fact—but based on the way the Doctor and Ace were reacting, it must have been quite a long time.

“About time they showed up,” Ace said, looking at the monitor. “Is that really a colony ship, though? It’s so beaten up!”

“It does look a bit the worse for wear, doesn’t it?” the Doctor agreed. “Maybe they had a rough trip. According to the TARDIS history files, society had forgotten many of the secrets of space travel that had let them move this far into the galaxy, so it took them nearly a year just to get from Xeno 10 to Xeno 3.”

Ace shook her head. “How do people manage to forget something like that?”

“It happens. Leela’s people had forgotten everything about technology in the time they spent on—” The Doctor stopped suddenly as a small explosion suddenly burst on the side of the colony ship.

“What was that?” Ace asked, even as the ship on the monitor began to plunge into the atmosphere of the planet, apparently out of control.

“I didn’t see anything hit them,” the Doctor remarked. “Something probably went wrong inside the ship.”

“Your history files didn’t say why they crashed?” Arthur asked, surprised.

“Wait, you knew they were going to crash, rather than land?” Ace asked.

“Well…of course. I thought everyone knew that. It was the start of the bad blood between our planets.” Arthur shrugged. “When the rest of the colonists arrived, the first ship’s surviving crew accused the Space Agency of having sent them out in a sabotaged ship, of trying to kill them. Most of the colonists on the rest of the fleet were related to the ones on the first ship—or at least members of the same extremist political group—so they sided with the first ship, but a full ship’s worth returned home and shared the story of the first ship’s unreasoning hate.”

The Doctor sighed sadly. “The worst of human nature right here before us,” she said, shaking her head.

“ _Was_ the ship sabotaged, then?” Ace asked.

“I doubt it, but it’s not impossible. What I meant was the propagandist slurs so built into Xeno 10’s history text that they’ve become second nature,” the Doctor said, gesturing at Arthur.

“Propagandist slurs…? But…I….”

“Do you know what that so-called extremist political group was?”

Arthur bit his lip, sure that no matter what he said, it would be wrong. “I wasn’t really—history wasn’t my best subject…”

“So. You don’t.”

“Um…I think it was…er…they _told_ us it was some kind of attempt to overthrow the planetary government…”

The disappointed look on the Doctor’s face hurt much more than any of the punches Arthur had gotten from his father. “It wasn’t a political group at all,” the Doctor informed him. “They were converts to a new religion. It was entirely harmless, but its popularity made the governmentally sanctioned religion nervous, and its most virulent mouthpieces spread vicious lies about the members of the new religion.”

“Oh. I…I’m sorry.”

The Doctor smiled, and patted him on the shoulder. “It’s all right. You didn’t know. But you have to learn not to take the standard accounts so literally. To spot the signs of bias.”

Arthur nodded. The more he thought about it, as he watched the ship still plunging through the atmosphere below, its hull on fire, the more he realised how much better it was this way. After all, if the idea of Curt’s ancestors being murderers had been bad, how much worse would it be if they had been cruel anarchists as well?

Ace winced when the ship finally crashed with a huge fireball. “People actually survived that?” she asked.

“The ship was designed to be tough,” the Doctor assured her, glancing down at some readouts on the console. “Besides, most of that explosion was the remaining fuel being ejected upwards into the atmosphere before it could incinerate the ship.” She adjusted some controls, and the video feed on the monitor moved to show the wrecked ship, half-buried in the side of a hill. Almost immediately, a hatch opened, and people started tumbling out, shaken and dazed, but clearly glad to be alive.

Within a few minutes, one of the indigenous lifeforms approached them. It only had four legs—based on what the computer had said, that must have made it pretty young—and it looked quite terrifying. Unlike the sick one in the computer’s video, this one moved with a disquieting speed, had shiny, slimy-looking skin and broad, coarse hairs across its back like an insect magnified grotesquely. The sight of the thing made Arthur shudder with revulsion.

It did more than just disgust the first colonists to see it: they screamed and started panicking, some running back inside the ship, and others brandishing weapons. The centaur began to produce a hideous noise, part buzzing and part hissing. One of the armed men raised his gun, aiming at the centaur. Another colonist, wearing a military insignia, screamed at him to stand down, but when the centaur took another step towards them, the man with the gun fired anyway, and the alien crumpled to the ground. It wasn’t clear if the centaur was dead or if it had only been wounded, but it certainly _looked_ like it was at least dying, to Arthur’s eyes anyway.

“Why didn’t the TARDIS translate what it had to say?” Ace asked, looking at the Doctor.

“I asked her not to,” the Doctor replied. “To make the colonists’ actions more clear.”

On the screen, the one with the military insignia was screaming at the man who had shot the centaur, enraged at having his orders disobeyed. “Commander, it was going to attack!” the man insisted, even as he let the commander take his gun away. “I just saved us all!”

“You don’t know that,” the commander retorted. “It didn’t look hostile to me.”

An argument began among the colonists, about half of them taking the side of the commander, and the other half taking the side of the killer. While they were arguing, more centaurs showed up, gathering around their fallen comrade and letting out keening moans of anguish that were frankly a little terrifying.

“More of them!” one of the colonists shouted. “Someone kill them!”

“Wait! Look at the way they’re behaving—the way they’re grieving. They might be sentient,” the commander insisted. “Someone fetch the translation device.”

The centaurs were now watching the colonists with fear and obvious distrust, even as some of their number carried away their fallen friend. They acted skittishly when the large, boxy translation device was wheeled out towards them, but when the device neither attacked them nor exploded, they settled back into a debate among themselves. The commander flipped a switch on the device, and it began to whir as the centaurs talked. Eventually it dinged, and the commander pressed a button.

“I am Commander Tevras of the colony ship _Astra Alpha_ ,” he said. The machine produced noises like the centaur speech, and they stopped talking, turning to look at him warily. “We come in peace, seeking an escape from persecution on our home world. Our ship was disabled by an explosion while we were in orbit, and we have been left shaken by the crash. One of our men panicked when he saw your friend. He thought himself in danger, and fired against my orders. It was not my will or the will of our group as a whole to harm your friend or any of your people. I extend our most sincere apologies for what he has done.”

When the machine finished translating his speech, one of the centaurs stepped forward. It had eight legs, the most of any of the ones gathered there. “Why did you come to make a colony on an inhabited world?” it asked. Or that was how the translation device translated its hissing speech, anyway.

“We didn’t realise it was inhabited,” Commander Tevras admitted, sounding embarrassed. “Our probes only reported back on atmospheric conditions, and the visuals we were able to see did not show any structures or signs of humanoid life. Seeing your people from above, our scientists did not realize you were sentient life forms. We would have picked another planet had we known.”

There was more muttering among the centaurs until the one in front spoke again. “We will consult with the Great Pjalsoom,” it said. “If the Great Pjalsoom believe your story, then we will help you to survive on our world. There is room enough for you two-legs to occupy the surface; we rarely use it.” The centaur gestured with one tentacle, a harsh, cutting motion that was distinctly threatening. “But if the Great Pjalsoom do not accept you, then you will have no place to run from our wrath!”

Tevras didn’t look too happy about that, but he nodded. “Every word I have spoken is the truth, and I will be pleased to provide as much evidence as possible to support it. Many of our computers were broken in the crash, but we still have video files and a few computer logs.”

The lead centaur repeated its threat, then the whole lot of them hastened away. Tevras gave orders to evacuate all items of value from the ship and move everything and everyone a safe distance away, in case the ship exploded. As the colonists began streaming back inside, Arthur turned to the Doctor. “So…does that mean the natives refused to accept what that commander was saying, and they went to war?”

“That doesn’t really fit what Pjalsoom told us,” the Doctor said. “Let’s jump ahead about a week and see what’s going on.”

She returned to the console, flipped a few switches, and then the ship let out another groaning wheeze, but it stopped almost as soon as it started. The image on the screen, which had switched to static, refocused on Tevras and some of the other colonists cutting down trees at the edge of a forest. The centaurs were gathering the fallen trees and using strange machines to cut them down into a large number of planks.

“I guess Pjalsoom believed them,” Ace commented. “Looks like they’re building their colony. You’d think they’d have brought some sort of pre-fab building materials with them, though.”

“They were probably destroyed in the crash,” the Doctor said. “We should see if we can find out when the problems started. Arthur, do you know when the next colony ship arrived?”

“It was about a year later,” he said. “The native lifeforms were all dead by then.”

“Try about six months, then?” Ace suggested.

The Doctor frowned. “Awfully haphazard. I’m going to consult some galactic databases and see what they have to say.”

“How long will that take?” Arthur asked. He didn’t want this whole thing to take _too_ long, or everyone might start to worry about them. Besides, that computer was going to resume its warmongering if they weren’t back soon, and he didn’t really trust this machine to get back when it was supposed to…

“Not long. They’re all backed up in the TARDIS mainframe.”

The Doctor left the room, leaving an awkward silence behind her. Arthur wouldn’t necessarily have minded talking, but he couldn’t think of anything to talk _about_ , so he just sat where he was without opening his mouth. Ace, meanwhile, seemed to be investigating every nook and cranny of the room, as if she was looking for something. As curious as Arthur was to know what she was looking for, he couldn’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t sound like he was accusing her of something. Ace was just returning to the central area when the Doctor came back.

“Looks like the trouble started about a month after the ship arrived,” she said, heading over to the controls. “I just hope this will prove to Pjalsoom that the colonists didn’t mean to kill its people.”

“Were you recording what was on the monitor before?” Arthur asked.

“Of course.” The Doctor set the ship to wheezing and groaning again, though it stopped quickly. “This will be the important one, though.”

She returned to the monitor, which was showing a view of the colony from above its primitive wooden buildings, with a single person running between the buildings, looking panicked. The Doctor adjusted the controls, and the monitor resolved into a picture of the interior of the building the panicked colonist ran inside. “Commander Tevras!” the panicked man shouted. “We’ve got a problem!”

Tevras, sitting behind an important-person-type desk, sighed. “What is it, Niev?”

“It’s the centaurs helping out with the mine,” Niev replied. “They’re sick.”

“Is that really something to panic over?”

Niev nodded. “It’s really…pretty bad….”

Tevras grimaced, but duly got up and followed Niev back through the colony, into a building with a crudely painted wooden sign that identified it as a mining office. Inside were a dozen centaurs, lying about, covered in pustules that were oozing a green, slimy substance, just like the one in the recording Pjalsoom had shown them. “What in the—is this a native disease?”

The centaurs groaned, and one spoke its hissing words. A translation device on its wrist relayed its response as “Even the Great Pjalsoom have never seen such suffering as ours.”

Tevras bit his lip, and stepped into the next room, gesturing Niev over. “Are any of our people sick?”

Niev shook his head. “Nothing serious, sir. I mean, old man Will’s daughter has a cold, but…”

“Any word from the rest of the fleet yet?”

“I don’t think they were even supposed to set out for months. Commander, do you know what’s wrong with them?”

“Not specifically,” Tevras said, shaking his head. “But whatever it is, we probably brought it with us. Who knows how our common cold might affect these creatures.” He clenched his fists. “Why did all our medical personnel have to die in the crash!?”

“Well, there’s still Mrs. Lane,” Niev pointed out.

“They’re sick, not pregnant. What’s a midwife going to accomplish?” Tevras shook his head. “We’ll have to see if we can get the medical computer working again, try to diagnose their illness ourselves. If we can figure out what’s made them sick, we should be able to cure it.”

Niev nodded, and they both hurried off. The Doctor turned off the sound, looking pensive. Ace stepped over to her, setting a hand on her arm. “There’s got to be some way to save them without changing history,” she said gently.

“No. Anything we do will be interfering…” The Doctor scowled, shaking her head. “If I’d made a mistake when I brought Arthur here, landed in this era instead of where I was going, I could have helped. If my past self had come to this era instead of its far future in dropping you off, we could have helped. But this isn’t in flux; we know how this ends.”

“Maybe we can save _some_ of them,” Ace suggested. “Ones that died without the colonists ever meeting them. Take them somewhere else.”

The Doctor looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, maybe we can,” she agreed. “But first let’s get a little more evidence to show Pjalsoom.” She adjusted the controls until they showed Tevras trying to mend a half-demolished computer. “Oh, that’s going to take at least a week.” Returning to the ship’s controls, the Doctor set it in time-motion again. The monitor went to static, then returned on the same room, where the computer was now more-or-less functioning, one of the pustule-covered centaurs was lying on a nearby examining table, and Tevras was staring at the computer’s flashing displays as several other colonists stood nearby, watching.

Eventually, the computer’s activities slowly ceased, and a single readout lit up. “All right, looks like the computer’s identified the disease,” Tevras said. “It…it did come with us.” He shook his head. “According to this readout, it’s that avian illness contracted from vegetables fertilised with trioxynitrate.” He shrugged. “Not sure how they caught a bird sickness, but at least there’s a cure. The machine’s mixing it up now.” Tevras turned to look at the ailing centaur. “We’ll have some medicine for you and your people in a couple of hours. Then everything will be okay. I promise.”

The Doctor grimaced. “Anyone with medical training could have told him that wasn’t going to work. If you give medicine designed for one species to one so radically different…I’m not surprised it poisoned them.”

“If they caught the same disease, though…” Ace started, sounding confused. “How is that possible?”

“If that diagnosis was the least bit accurate, then it’s probably more the case that both the birds on Xeno 10 and the Lvggwx had allergic reactions to consuming trace amounts of trioxynitrate. But what alleviates one species’ allergic reactions won’t do much for another. Especially if the medical condition of the Lvggwx was exacerbated by human diseases as well.”

“Do you think we need more information for Pjalsoom, or is this enough?”

“We probably need some more.” The Doctor went to another set of controls and fiddled with them. “All right, the TARDIS is conducting some long-range scans of the condition of the Lvggwx. I’ve got something I need to do while that’s going on. You keep an eye on the monitor, make sure to record it if anything happens.”

With that, the Doctor left the room, and Ace morosely planted herself in front of the monitor. Arthur wasn’t sure what _he_ should be doing, so he just sat there, feeling even more useless than usual…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can't bond three oxygen molecules to one nitrogen molecule. (And even if you could, what in the world would it actually accomplish?) But it sounded good, y'know? Probably there's some other molecule in there as a bonding agent or something. Or maybe the whole name is one giant acronym for a really complicated futuristic product. :P
> 
> Anyway, I'm sorry that this fic has boiled down to "the opening is Velvet Goldmine with some Doctor Who characters inserted and the ending is Doctor Who with some Velvet Goldmine characters inserted." But no matter how hard I tried to rebalance it, it still ended up this way. :(


	12. Chapter 12

It had been the most boring trip to the past Ace had ever been on; they hadn’t even left the TARDIS. Worst of all, they had simply _recorded_ it as the innocent—but visually disgusting—creatures on the planet below had become infected and died of a disease brought in by the human colonists. Or an allergic reaction to colonist food, or whatever had happened. The Doctor didn’t much seem to believe the colonists’ diagnosis, and Ace was more inclined to believe it was an airborne disease, too, just like had happened to the natives when Europeans landed in the Americas. Whatever had happened to those Lvggwx (Ace was still unable to fathom how the Doctor was so easily able to pronounce that word when it sounded like it was solid consonants), it was clear that the colonists were doubly responsible, having first brought the illness, and then made it worse with medicine incompatible with their alien hosts’ bodily systems. Ace could understand why Pjalsoom was angry, but the colonists really hadn’t meant any harm, and their descendants certainly didn’t deserve to be punished for it.

The TARDIS rematerialized back in Pjalsoom’s cave. The Doctor brought a small, high-tech computer terminal with her (she called it an eye-pad, whatever _that_ was supposed to mean), which she presented to Pjalsoom even as Ace and Arthur were following her towards the enormous computer. “Can you interface with this?” the Doctor asked. “It has video footage of everything we saw in the past, and some data on the illness that killed the Lvggwx.”

A small door opened in the side of Pjalsoom’s memory bank, and a tentacle-like wire emerged. “We can interface with any machine, given enough time,” the giant computer rumbled. After the tentacle fondled the blank, flat device (which reminded Ace of the clipless clipboard Shannon had been using during the Doctor’s audition, actually), the end of the tentacle changed, a connector emerging from the end. The connector slotted into a small hole on the terminal the Doctor held, then Pjalsoom’s entire computer bank began to vibrate and hum.

“You can see that the colonists didn’t mean to harm your people,” the Doctor told it. “Can’t you?”

“Do your own people not punish those who have brought harm, even against their own will?” Pjalsoom replied, withdrawing the wire-tentacle from the device. “The humans committed genocide. Even accidentally, that is a crime we must punish.”

The Doctor shook her head. “I can’t let you do that,” she said, soft but firm. “Some of their ancestors accidentally committed a terrible wrong, but these modern people have done nothing to deserve punishment.”

“You plan to destroy us as the humans destroyed our people?” Pjalsoom asked, it voice level.

“I don’t want to. You’re an ancient work of art. The idea of damaging you is abhorrent.” The Doctor smiled at him. “I’d like to work out a deal.”

“We have no desire to allow the humans to live while the Lvggwx are dead.”

“That’s just it,” the Doctor said. “What if we can bring back some of your people? Find them a new world to live on, where there aren’t any humans or human diseases. Then will you let the humans go unpunished?”

“How do you propose to do this?”

“My ship can bring more than just data back from the past,” the Doctor said. “Look at Ace here: she was born more than a million years ago.”

“We’re really _that_ far in the future?!” Ace hadn’t quite expected them to have gone so far forwards…

“Closer to a billion, actually,” the Doctor corrected herself with a nervous laugh that made Ace suspect that it was actually a lot longer than that. The idea was decidedly unsettling, and she was suddenly very grateful for how restrained the jumps into the future with _her_ Doctor had been.

“And you will change the past to bring the Lvggwx to the present?” Pjalsoom asked.

“Ah, see, there’s the problem. Changing the past knowingly is a very dangerous proposition. When time travellers knowingly step in and alter the past, it can cause ripples in space-time that…well, in the worst case scenario, some rather vicious things can come out through the resulting chronal distortion, and they have a particularly deadly bite.” The Doctor shook her head. “So I can’t save all the Lvggwx. But if there were any cases of whole groups of them who vanished, or died without leaving any bodies behind, I can step in there. Volcanic eruptions, islands sinking into the sea, cave-ins that were never dug out again, mysterious disappearances, things like that. Can you think of any examples? Preferably ones involving large numbers of the Lvggwx, and not too much earlier than the arrival of the humans.”

Pjalsoom rumbled for a moment or two. “Your suggestions are…odd. You think like a human.”

“In some ways, yes,” the Doctor agreed. “If you have other causes of death to avoid, that’s fine, but the important thing is that the Lvggwx we’ll be saving must have left behind no trace, no proof that they died rather than being evacuated. Even an unrecognizable burnt corpse is still proof they died. I’ve caused myself trouble once before, unwittingly rescuing someone who was supposed to go down with the airship she was on.”

“When was that?” Ace asked.

“It hasn’t happened yet for the version of my past self you travel with,” the Doctor told her. “So don’t say anything about it to me when I come back for you.”

Ace nodded. Pity. That would have been an interesting story to hear.

“We believe there is one such case, but it is very long ago,” Pjalsoom said. “It is, in fact, very early in our existence.”

“Tell me about it,” the Doctor said.

“When we were built, the caves were holy spaces. The caves were where the Lvggwx were brought to life by the three spirits. But because the three spirits had left this world behind, the Lvggwx built us to replace them. Unlike them, we are unable to move unaided, and we speak with but one voice, however within we are three, as they were, and yet we are also one, as they were.”

Ace found herself fighting not to laugh. It sounded like these Lvggwx had been created by three versions of the same Time Lord. And she had to wonder if maybe that had been the Doctor, and she’d simply forgotten about it…or maybe hadn’t done it yet.

“We were built to fill the holy caverns with our wisdom, which was meant to emulate the wisdom of the three spirits,” Pjalsoom continued. “At this time, the Lvggwx lived on the surface world, basking in the light of the sun, dancing in the light of the moons, and enjoying peace and happiness. But then the world was shattered. We were never sure what crashed into this world. It came from the stars, and it was massive; one whole landmass was pulped and became sea. Many Lvggwx were living on that land, and were lost in an instant. The rest of the world was shrouded in darkness for many centuries, and the Lvggwx began to live in these caverns. No longer holy, the land under the ground became home, and the Lvggwx learned to grow food without the sun, see without light, speak without vibrating the stone. When the land above grew fertile again, the Lvggwx began to emerge in small groups for brief times, but continued to live below, until the humans came.”

“I see,” the Doctor said, nodding. “It was probably a large asteroid. How long were you without contact from the Lvggwx on that landmass before it was destroyed?”

“Our last contact with the lost Lvggwx was six hours prior.”

“How many Lvggwx lived there?”

“Several million Lvggwx were lost in that instant.”

The Doctor winced. “Six hours isn’t enough to evacuate several million. But we should be able to save several thousand.”

“What about if we use the six hours several times?” Arthur suggested. “Couldn’t that help?”

“We can’t risk running into ourselves,” the Doctor said sharply.

“If it’s a whole continent, though,” Ace said. “Surely we could land at one end, then the other, then the middle, all without us seeing each other.”

“Maybe…I’ll need to see the size of the landmass, and the distance between the population centres, and…can you provide me all the information you have on the event?” the Doctor asked, holding up the terminal towards Pjalsoom. “I’ll save as many of them as I can.”

Pjalsoom’s wire-tentacle connected with the eye-pad again. “How will you carry so many of the Lvggwx with you in your small box?”

“It’s not as small as you think,” the Doctor assured him.

“Really, it’s enormous inside!” Arthur added. “At least the size of a city.”

“The space is potentially infinite, but that would drain vast amounts of power,” the Doctor clarified. “Fortunately, she’s been charging up on some kind of energy in the atmosphere of this planet, so we’ll be fine, as long as we don’t have the Lvggwx on board for too long. Which reminds me, do you think you can transfer your program into another device?”

“You would wish this puny vessel to hold all of the Great Pjalsoom?” the computer roared, using its wire-tentacle to rip the eye-pad out of the Doctor’s hands and wave it in the air in front of her.

“Of course not,” the Doctor said, laughing. “No, I’ve built a robotic casing for you out of left-over parts from the last few times I rebuilt K-9. With some spare memory banks from the TARDIS. Any of the major supercomputers from the standard galactic civilisations should be able to fit with room to spare, but I don’t know how differently you were created. Did these three spirits of yours have any hand in building you?”

“No, the three spirits had already left, heedless of their creations. But the Lvggwx used technology they left behind to create us.”

The Doctor nodded. “Should work fine, then. I’ll go in and get it, and then you can come with us to get your people, and go with them to their new world.”

The Doctor jumped slightly to take back the eye-pad, and headed into the TARDIS. Ace followed her. “Here, Doctor, do you think these three spirits it’s talking about were Time Lords?” she asked.

“Probably, but if so, they were renegades. There’s no mention of this planet in the Matrix on Gallifrey.” The Doctor frowned as she slid the eye-pad into a slot on the console. “I’m a little worried about that, actually. There’s no way it was three of my future selves, so…”

“Yeah, the Lvggwx would probably have been worshipping the name Doctor if it had been,” Ace agreed, laughing.

“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I’m vain?”

“I think you’re very fond of identifying yourself to everyone you meet.” Ace shook her head. “So’s the Master. If it had been three of him…well, if it’d been three of him, they’d probably have ended up as psychopaths who slaughtered everything they saw.”

“The Master doesn’t work well with himself. Usually.” The Doctor shook her head. “It might have been the Rani.” She shrugged. “Or it could be some ancient renegade I never met or even heard of. We don’t _all_ know each other, after all.”

“Or a future renegade,” Ace suggested. “Isn’t that a possibility, too?”

“I’m not sure…” The Doctor frowned, looking puzzled. “That might…might violate the…no, maybe not. I suppose it’s possible,” she concluded, shrugging. “There are so many paradoxes inherent in having multiple versions of the same Time Lord meeting that it warps the brain a bit to try and comprehend it all. Some lingering after-effect of that might be why the TARDIS was able to charge up here…”

“How many times have you met up with previous versions of yourself?”

“Difficult to say. You can’t always remember it afterwards. Especially the first time it happens.”

“So if those three spirits _were_ all you, you wouldn’t remember it if even one of them is one of your future selves,” Ace interpreted.

“Exactly. But it wasn’t me, can’t have been. Biological engineering isn’t something I dabble in, and those creatures were heavily engineered. They were _designed_ to sprout more legs as they get older.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? But if it was the Rani…she might just have wanted to see what happens. She’s the dark side of science, the side that doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as she gets her data.” The Doctor shook her head. “Whoever it was, they evidently didn’t want the Lvggwx to know who they were, so we won’t figure it out. And it wasn’t _necessarily_ a Time Lord at all. There are all sorts of sentient life forms in the universe. Hive minds, mentally-linked parasitic beings, lots of other possibilities. Anyway, every minute we dally in here gives Pjalsoom a chance to change its mind. Their mind. Let’s just get the new body and get back out there.”

She opened a door further into the TARDIS, and picked up a remote control from a ledge just beside the door. As she manipulated the remote control, a robotic form rolled in through the open door. The base was the same trapezoidal form that she’d seen in photographs of the Doctor with his old tin dog (oh-so-creatively named K-9), but there was no head. “Um…Doctor…did you forget something?”

“Since it seems to like using flat screens to project a face…” The Doctor pressed a button on the remote control in her hand and a screen not unlike her eye-pad raised up out of the trapezoid. “I couldn’t give the screen all the functions of K-9’s head, but it can at least pivot.” Manipulating a control, she made the screen turn in all directions. “There’s a camera in both the front and the back of the tablet, and I doubt Pjalsoom will have any trouble using the cameras. As long as the entire mainframe program can fit, this body should suffice.”

“Unless there are stairs on the new world of the Liv-lav-lva—those bug-aliens,” Ace pointed out.

“The only way it’ll have stairs is if they build them.” The Doctor turned to smile at her. “And if they do…well, that’s their choice, isn’t it?”

“Guess so.” Any computer could turn into an evil computer in the wrong circumstances, after all. Got to give the Lvggwx a way of shutting the computer out if the worst should happen…

The Doctor led the way out of the TARDIS, using the remote control to lead the device along behind her. Ace followed, wondering how Pjalsoom would react to such a small body being suggested as its new form. The computer didn’t react until it had spread out a wire-tentacle and interfaced with the body.

“It will suffice,” the computer announced. “We will transfer our consciousness into this small form, and cease the functioning of our eroding old one.”

The massive computer whirred more loudly for a few minutes, then gradually became still and quiet. Pjalsoom’s face appeared on the screen raised out of the trapezoidal base. “Yes, this will do nicely,” it said, sounding almost satisfied. “Now, you will show us how you intend to save our people.”

“Of course,” the Doctor said, with a smile. “Right this way!”

***

Arthur was excited by the idea of watching as the Doctor saved a species (no matter how disgusting) from extinction, and Ace was practically bouncing off the walls. (As close as she seemed likely to come to it, anyway.) Pjalsoom rolled about back and forth in the front room of the TARDIS, making incoherent comments to himself as the Doctor messed about with the console in the centre of the room.

Finally, the ship began to groan and wheeze as it set off on its journey. Once the groaning and wheezing stopped, the Doctor looked at Pjalsoom. “All right, we’re over one of the major population centres. I’m going to open the door. You make an announcement to draw all the Lvggwx into one place.”

Just like that, the doors opened and Pjalsoom went to the door, where he emitted a shriek that did not translate the way the rest of his speech had. Arthur could feel wind rushing in as the TARDIS flew over the top of the city, and Pjalsoom shrieked over and over again. Then they landed on top of a great hill in the centre of the city, and the doors closed. “I’m connecting the doors to an empty bay deeper in the TARDIS, freshly generated and completely sterile,” the Doctor announced. “It should hold most of the population of the city. It can probably more of them than can cram in there over the next five and half hours, at any rate.”

And then, much to Arthur’s dismay, they just _sat_ there for five and a half hours, watching video of a stream of the hideous things filing into the doors of the TARDIS, which now went somewhere else. When the skies lit up red and a heavy bell began to sound from deep within the TARDIS, the Doctor began manipulating buttons, and the groaning, wheezing sound started again.

“We didn’t save them all!” Pjalsoom objected.

“I told you we had a strict time limit!” the Doctor reminded him. “If any of that lava gets in—or if there’s toxic smoke—then everyone who already boarded the TARDIS could die, maybe even us! There’d be no point to that, would there?”

Pjalsoom let out a sound that seemed to be a sigh. “Very well. But you will be taking us to the other cities now, yes?” It wasn’t _quite_ a demand, but it was pretty close. Arthur didn’t want to see what the computer was going to do if the Doctor refused.

“Actually, we took on a lot more of the Lvggwx than I was expecting from that first city,” the Doctor said. “I don’t think we can handle any more at a time. We’ll drop them off on their new home world, then go back for the next city.”

The computer made a clicking noise inside its tinny body. “Very well,” it said in a manner that came off as downright condescending.

“Um, does that mean we’re going to have to repeat that boring process _again_?” Arthur asked Ace quietly as the TARDIS took off moving again.

“Sounds like it.” She chuckled. “Who’d have thought rescuing an alien race from extinction could be so dull?”

***

In all, they had visited five different cities on the Lvggwx continent before it sank into the sea in a cataclysm that had raised the level of the ocean, creating the worldwide patchwork of islands and archipelagos that made up Xeno 3 in…well, it wasn’t _modern_ times…in Arthur’s times. Ace had tried teaching Arthur a few card games, but that hadn’t panned out too well—one of them was much too easy to win because he hadn’t grasped the rules at all, and the other one he absolutely demolished her at every time—but had ended up spending a lot of that time just plain napping. It was more than a full (Earth) day, after all!

Eventually they took the last load of Lvggwx refugees to the uninhabited world on the fringe of the galaxy, and let the enormous bug-like “centaurs” off to roam the verdant, unsullied plains. If it weren’t for the hideous aliens, Ace would have liked to see more of that untamed world, but as it was…she’d pass. Gladly.

“According to the Matrix on Gallifrey, no intelligent life ever journeys to this remote world,” the Doctor assured Pjalsoom as the last Lvggwx were leaving the TARDIS. “It has no rare resources of any value to any space-travelling species, and it’s far from all the known galactic and intergalactic wars. And next time I’m talking to any of the galactic authorities, I’ll make sure to let them know this sector is off-limits. They usually listen to me.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Pjalsoom said. “As much as we would have liked to punish the humans for what they did to the Lvggwx, it is better to have our people back again. Go in peace, and may the three spirits watch favourably over your voyages.”

The Doctor thanked him—for the bizarre honour of the blessing of a rogue-Time-Lord-turned-god—and opened the doors of the TARDIS to let Pjalsoom roll out in its new body and join its people on their new world. Then the doors shut again, and the Doctor started the TARDIS moving again. “Now, we have a war to stop,” she announced.

“Any chance they’ll just work it out on their own?” Ace asked. She wasn’t very hopeful, but…

“I doubt it,” Arthur sighed. “President Reynolds seemed really worked up about the idea of charging insane tariffs against everyone and everything connected to Xeno 10. Eventually, the ambassador will lose his temper. And even if he doesn’t, the king will have a fit. He hates Xeno 3 anyway.”

“I’ll just explain to them about Pjalsoom’s little scheme to start a war, and it’ll be fine,” the Doctor assured them, as the TARDIS landed right in the middle of the president’s office on Xeno 3, in the middle of the conference, from the look of it. “You two wait in here. Just in case.”

With that, the Doctor went outside to explain, clearly in the expectation that it would be a quick and easy matter.

It wasn’t.

Ace lost track of how many times the Doctor had to explain and re-explain, and answer questions, and explain yet again. She must have been talking for at least two hours. And none of the politicians seemed the least bit happy with any of her explanations of why there was no reason to go to war. The people of Xeno 3—or at least their representatives in that office—clearly _wanted_ a war.

By the end, the Doctor was just about outright _threatening_ Reynolds, reminding him of what history would think of him, and how the whole galaxy would side with Xeno 10, and all sorts of things. Even so, it was only in the most grudging manner that he accepted her arbitration, dropped his calls for war, promised to free Harold the not-assassin, and gave up on _most_ of his economic sanctions. Only then did the Doctor return to the TARDIS and take it back to the alley where it had been parked all this time.

“I should get back to Xeno 10 before my friends miss me,” the Doctor said, smiling at them. “And I shouldn’t still be here when my younger self returns to pick you up tomorrow,” she added, looking at Ace.

“Yeah.” Ace was looking forward to getting her own Doctor back. This female one was fun and all, but she didn’t know the first thing about ‘girl talk,’ and she seemed even more irresponsible than the one Ace was used to. “It’s been fun getting to see your future.”

“It’s been great getting to see you again,” the Doctor agreed, giving Ace a hug. That was the weirdest part. Ace couldn’t even _imagine_ her Doctor hugging someone. Pulling them into his arms to get them out of the path of a laser blast, maybe, but not _hugging_. “Just remember not to mention any of this to my younger self.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t believe me even if I did,” Ace said, with a laugh.

“And are you going to be okay?” the Doctor asked, looking at Arthur.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he assured her, with a big smile. “I can’t thank you enough for bringing me here…and getting me in the door with Curt and Brian…”

“It was my pleasure,” the Doctor assured him, obviously oblivious to the sexual connotations of what Arthur had said. Was she actually _more_ clueless about that sort of thing than she had been when she was Ace’s Doctor?

After a few more rounds of goodbyes—and some more unsettling hugs—Ace and Arthur both left the TARDIS, which closed its doors behind them, and took off. It was only the second time Ace had seen the TARDIS take off without her, and it left an ache in her heart. How did people ever choose to stop travelling with the Doctor? She couldn’t imagine it.

They walked back to the concert complex, where they found Brian, Curt and most of the other musicians all sitting about the cafeteria, watching news videos. Arthur did most of the talking to tell them about everything that had happened; he had to, really, since Ace was now once again having to depend on that awful headset to translate for her. No one seemed to believe a word of it, except maybe Brian and Curt. They both expressed their interest in “rewarding” Arthur for his role in preventing the war. Brian offered to expand that “reward” to Ace, an offer that she swiftly rejected. He didn’t seem to mind.

The following morning, Ace left behind all the glittery gear Brian’s spiderbot had made for her, and put her own clothes (freshly laundered by some robot or other) back on before heading to the lift, planning to go upstairs to Brian’s suite to say her own goodbyes. After thinking about it a moment, though, she thought the better of it, and headed down to the ground floor instead. Brian and Curt didn’t care; there was no reason to say goodbye to them. And Arthur probably didn’t care, either. It was simpler to just go.

It turned out, however, that they were all three in the cafeteria, so she ended up having breakfast with them, despite Brian’s visible distaste for her real clothes. (He even offered to send someone upstairs to fetch her other clothes so she could keep them, but Ace really didn’t want them.) After they finished eating, Ace said goodbye to them and headed for the door to the street, leaving Arthur waving at her where he stood in between Brian and Curt, each of them with an arm around him.

If nothing else had come of the whole adventure (other than the rescuing of the Lvggwx from extinction), at least Arthur was happy! Ace hoped, for his sake, that it would last.

She went to the Monument at the time the Doctor was supposed to come back for her, and sat down on a bench to wait. As the other Doctor had said, the TARDIS arrived off target and an hour late.

Still, on seeing its beat-up exterior, Ace couldn’t help smiling as she ran to open the door. “Here, Professor, you’re late!” she exclaimed almost giddily as she stepped into the familiar, white-walled console room.

“Am I?” The Doctor—her own Doctor, silly costume and curmudgeonly old face and all—rapped on a gauge on the console. “Must need adjusting. How was your vacation?”

“Oh, you know. Joined a band, saved an alien race, stopped a war. Same old, same old.”

The Doctor laughed.

“How was your errand?”

“Miserable!” The Doctor shook his head. “Nothing ever changes on Gallifrey. That’s why I left in the first place.” He nodded firmly. “I believe we could both use a proper vacation. Is there any place you’d like to go?”

“How about the 1970s?” Ace asked. “I fancy going to see a glam rock show.” Since the one she’d seen here had been interrupted.

“Nothing easier!” The Doctor began adjusting dials. “We could even see it from backstage if you want. I happen to have an in with a theatre owner, Henry Gordon Jago III.”

“No, from the front, please. The view’s rubbish from the wings.”

The Doctor shrugged. “As you like.” He set the TARDIS in motion. “We’ll be in 1972 by the time the tea is ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When the Doctor mentioned "the major supercomputers from the standard galactic civilisations" it was sooooo hard not to list any of the computers mentioned in the conversation with Deep Thought! But despite certain cross-overs (like the Doctor reading a work by Oolon Coluphid) it's not actually possible for the two to be in the same universe, so I held off on mentioning the Miliard Gargantubrain, etc.
> 
> The Rani is a character with such interesting possibilities. I should really look up sometime if there are any really good novels and/or Big Finish Audios with her in them.


End file.
